Attila the Hun (12 page)

‘Yes, he could look scary. But his mood changed in a second. He has this nice smile. Then he was really funny. He swore. Like something was “bitchily good”, as we say. Then sometimes the way he looked . . .’ She was driving us along a flat, straight road over the
puszta
, but her mind was not on grasslands. ‘We have an expression, that when someone looks at you like that they can see your bones. That was how it felt. He could see my bones. He just looked at me and asked me a really simple question, and I had to think really hard, because he was looking into my eyes, and he was amazing.’ She paused. ‘He really was. Honestly.’

Clearly, there was more to Kassai than the scattered responses that came my way during that interview. It took me another meeting on his home ground, more talk, and respectful observation to understand. Mounted archery is his life’s work. To explain it to me would have taken weeks. Fortunately, he has already taken the time by writing his story in a book,
Horseback Archery
. But even that tells only half the story. The other half emerges in action, in teaching, in
the commitment that others give him. There could be no real understanding of him except in action, any more than there can be a real understanding of what it takes to be a mounted archer unless you become one.

He is a man whose life perfectly matches what he feels is his destiny. From this flows a steely self-assurance, a rock-solid sense of identity and purpose, hard-won in a world that he sees as obsessed by change, growth, novelty and ambitions which, once realized, must be replaced by new ambitions. Kassai, like a monk, heard the call, followed, and arrived at his goal. But, unlike a monk, he did not find the way and the goal through a teaching, or an organization, or a Master. They are his alone. And both have involved an extraordinary combination of physical and mental work. There is something of the Zen warrior in him, the fighter who achieves internal balance to hone his martial skills – except that he had to become his own Master, invent his own religion, as it were. It has taken him over 20 years.

I asked again: Why? He says he has no choice in the matter, as if mounted archery were in his very genes. Of course, it couldn’t be, because the skills of the mounted archer were not around long enough to work their way into the genetic code. For nomads, the roots lay not in nature but in nurture, in skills implanted in childhood and perfected over decades. Kassai did not have that advantage. He grew up in a world of collective farmers and city-dwellers and factory-workers. Perhaps, as a child, he experienced another sort of nurture, some unconscious need to escape the oppression imposed by
the Soviet-backed counter-revolution, the drabness of communism.

Escape lay in his imagination, sparked off in his childhood by a novel about the Huns,
The Invisible Man
, by Géza Gárdonyi. It is the story of a Thracian slave, Zeta, who travels to Attila’s court with the Greek civil servant Priscus (the invisible man himself, whose real-life eye-witness account of the journey in 449 is the subject of a later chapter). Zeta has many adventures, falls in love with a flighty Hun girl, rejects another who loves him despite rejection, campaigns with Attila, fights in the great battle of the Catalaunian Plains, witnesses Attila’s funeral, and finally flees to safety with the girl he recognizes at last to be his own true love. It’s all rather overblown, with a great many exclamation marks, but it’s a good, quick, vivid read for children, and is justly famous in Hungary. Never out of print since its publication in 1902, it reflects and intensifies Attila’s popularity and the widespread belief that the Huns were the Hungarians’ true ancestors, never mind that everyone also knows perfectly well that their real ancestors arrived as Magyars over 400 years later.

Here’s a taste of it, in its English translation, unfortunately entitled
Slave of the Huns
, describing in lurid and exaggerated terms Attila’s hordes preparing for their advance westward:

Young people exercised out in the fields in huge swarms. Horns blared out signals. A long falling note meant a retreat. Two long rising notes meant an
about-face in mid-gallop and shoot. This manoeuvre I simply could not master. The Huns had been practising from childhood on; when the horses were galloping so fast that they were swimming through the air, the riders would turn themselves round, lie on their stomachs and shoot their arrows far behind them. Some even shot lying on their backs.

F
or weeks, the hordes continue to arrive, the Alans with their javelins, Nubades in wolfskins, bearded Blemmyes, painted Gelons armed with scythes, the thundering carts of the Bastarnes, Akatiri with bows half again as tall as themselves, haggard, large-boned Skirians, and Heruls and Kvads and Ostrogoths, and on and on for pages,

ten thousand here, twenty thousand there, fifty thousand of the Jazyges alone, eighty thousand Gepids, sixty thousand Goths. We counted them for a week, just by taking their leaders’ word for how many there were. When we passed the half million mark, we left off. To this day I don’t know how many people were gathered . . . there must have been more than a million horses and thousands upon thousands of carts.

Heady stuff to a boy yearning for action and freedom, happy to be swept along by a novelist’s exaggerations. ‘Yes, our ancestors the Huns were the greatest horseback archers of the world,’ says Kassai. ‘I imagined the wild gallops, the horses foaming at the mouth, the drawn bows. What a sensation! I wanted to be like them, a terrifying, fearless warrior.’

The first step was to become an archer. As a child and then as a young man, living near Kaposvár, 40 kilo-metres south of Lake Balaton, he made bows by the dozen, gathering information and experience. He tried different types of wood for their power and speed of reaction, the best ways to laminate tendons (on the back of the bow, to resist stretching) and horn (on the belly, to resist compression), arrows for weight and rigidity, arrowheads for their penetration. He became a good shot, building up on rapid fire as well.
¹
This is demanding enough in itself. The muscles and sinews of the forearm and shoulder must turn to iron. The three fingers of the firing-hand must get used to the bowstring’s constant abrasion, for in the heat of battle mounted archers could not use either the protective leather tab of modern archers or the thumb-ring employed later by Turks. If you train from childhood, the fingers adapt by growing calloused skin, but Kassai did not have that advantage; he binds his fingers with tape.

But all of this was mere archery. He still had not ridden. Having tried a few formal riding lessons, he realized that there was no-one from whom he could learn to ride like a nomad. Practically the only place he could have learned today is Mongolia, where children
as young as three are tied onto horses until the two become one. It was too late, and Mongolia too far away, for Kassai; he was grown up, and would have to teach himself. This he did in his twenties with the aid of a spirited creature called Prankish, who baptized him with fire, sweeping him off by galloping under low branches, dragging him by the stirrup, and falling on him in mud. ‘The only time I sensed the countryside was when I had my head buried in it.’

One day, a wild gallop ended at a steep hillside. Prankish stopped. In unexpected stillness, Kassai looked around. He was in a dead-end valley, with sides so steep and close it seemed that if he reached out he would touch them. It felt like finding his place in the world, a place where, in words that are emotive even in translation, ‘accepting the sweet solitude of a voluntary exile, I could retreat from this noisy century and develop mounted archery to perfection’.

Not that it was yet a place to live or ride in, for it was densely forested, its open spaces overgrown with weeds, its lowest area a mess of mud and reeds. It belonged to a state farm, but as farmland it was useless; so he rented 15 hectares and set about adapting it for horseback archery.

This was a long, slow process. A valley like that, where nature ruled, deserved the respect due to a sovereign entity. A man might befriend it for the brief term of his earthly existence, but he must cause no permanent damage. He must attend to the winds, the waters, the plants, the movements of animals and people. How does the wind blow around the contours
of the hills? Which way does the water flow? What happens when there is a lot of rain, or a long drought? Where does the snow melt first and last? Which way do horses walk, and where do they like to lie? Where do they graze in the day and where at night? When people come, where do they stop spontaneously to talk or to make fire? Where, in particular, do they like to shoot? It took him four years to absorb all this, and the smell of the pastures in the changing seasons, and the feel of each hilltop and each marshy area, and to decide how best to realize his dream.

Everything about this ancient, forgotten skill had to be rediscovered from scratch. The landscape gave him a natural 90-metre course, along which targets would be placed. He acquired a second horse, a poor limping creature he saved from the knacker’s yard, and therefore cheap. Over months of tender, loving care, Bella became sleek, gentle and sensitive. With her, Kassai discovered how to accustom a horse to the lunge-rein, the saddle, the peculiar feel of a mounted archer. Bella learned to gallop evenly along the course, then do the same thing without reins, then accept the odd noises and sensations of sticks, ribbons, bags, balls being whirled and thrown above her head, until finally she was ready for the twang of the bow, the zip of the arrow and the feel of a rider firing time after time, with nothing to indicate a turn or a change of pace but small movements of the legs and shifts of bodyweight forward and back.

The first experience of mounted archery was a revelation. His target was a bale of hay, but even
galloping right past, no more than 2 or 3 metres away, he could fire only one arrow every pass, and hardly ever hit the mark. In particular, he found it almost impossible to perform the most famous action of the mounted archer, the over-the-shoulder ‘Parthian shot’, named after the Parthians and then distorted in English into the ‘parting shot’. He practised for weeks, doing fifteen to twenty gallops a day. Bella became stronger and stronger; but he – already an expert archer, with numerous wins in competitions – remained as hopeless as ever. There seemed to be no way to overcome the combinations of movements, the forward motion and bounce of the gallop, the shock of hooves, his own leaping body, the arms flailing in automatic response. It seemed quite impossible to aim and then fire accurately, let alone reload.

He almost despaired. There was something he was not getting, something that Attila, that every Hun warrior, every mounted archer from time immemorial, must have learned in late childhood, until it was so much part of them that it was never mentioned to the few outsiders who recorded their ways. He stopped riding, not to abandon his dream, but to search for the essence of the skill he sought, the barbarian artistry hidden away by the obscuring cloud of civilization.

Kassai turned inwards. He would abandon the effort that dominates standard archery, the rational focus on accuracy, the route that has led to the stabilizers and targeting devices of the competitive sport. Technology and reason did not provide the way. He turned instead to Zen archery, which relies on internal harmony,
achieving success by trying less. It is, at heart, the same approach with which a child learns to ride a bicycle, or the ‘relaxed concentration’ by which an athlete in explosive events – javelin-throwing, high jump, pole-vault – produces a seemingly effortless record.

He returned to the basics: horse and rider. He abandoned his saddle to ride bareback. He wanted to feel the body of the horse, the muscles, the sweat, the breathing, become at one with it. Pain became a way of life. He fell constantly. His urine had blood in it for weeks from the battering. He learned this: that pain and suffering are not the same. This was not suffering, because nothing had been imposed on him, and he was free to face more pain, in the certain knowledge that he was making progress. Wounds heal quickly, as he says, and we can continue on our way to meet the next obstacle, always moving in the direction of the greatest resistance. He had chosen this route as monks once chose hair shirts and flagellation, and it filled him with the fierce joy of approaching salvation. Was this obsessive, a little crazy, perhaps? It was, and he welcomed the madness.

For from this madness came renewed sanity, and success. He learned to separate upper from lower body. He imagined the track made through the air by his extended left hand, until, holding a glass of water, he could keep his hand steady while riding bareback at a trot. He acquired more horses, and practised on them all. He explored the worst conditions – rain, mud, snow, frozen ground. He worked in particular at the ‘Parthian’, the ‘parting’, the over-the-shoulder shot,
keeping the waist forward while the body turned through 180 degrees. He would turn himself into a centaur, the half-horse, half-man invented by the Greeks as a symbol of the Scythian mounted archer.

Meanwhile, he perfected the techniques of firing. A major stumbling block was the need to fire one arrow after another, at speed. This is not something that your average unmounted archer ever does, so even an expert does not have to
feel
the way to reload. An arrow has a nock in its end which slots onto the bowstring, but, as any amateur knows, it takes many seconds and many actions to load an arrow – you lower the bow, turn it flat, reach for the quiver, extract an arrow, turn the arrow to the correct orientation with the ‘lead-feather’ pointing away from the string, fiddle the slot onto the string, get the tips of three fingers hooked round the string, grip the arrow between first and second fingers to keep it in position against the bow, raise the bow, pull the string, refocus your attention on the distant target, aim, and at last fire. The whole thing takes perhaps half a minute, which is about the time it takes to read the foregoing instructions.