Attila the Hun (13 page)

It took Kassai months, and much experimenting, to work out how to fire quickly. For a start, forget the quiver. That’s only to store arrows; it is not for the arrows you are about to fire, because it is hopelessly slow to reload by reaching down to your waist or over your shoulder to pull an arrow from your quiver.

This is how it’s done: hold a bunch of arrows in the left hand against the bow, making sure they are spread like an array of cards; reach between string and bow;
grip an arrow with two fingers bent double so that they form firm supports either side; place the thumb just so; pull the arrow back so that the string slides along the thumb straight into the nock in the arrow; and pull, while raising the bow, all in one smooth set of actions. But these are mere words. To put them into action is to perform crucial gestures as minute and fine as learning Braille (for example, to make sure the nock in the arrow is oriented correctly, you check with your thumb – and without practice you can hardly feel the nock at all, let alone make any correction, let alone do so on a galloping horse). After a year –

–
he could fire three arrows in six seconds.

Say that out loud, three times, fast: that’s how long it takes him to load and fire the three arrows.

Now it was time to apply his new skills. He began loading and drawing at the gallop, aiming in all three directions consecutively, to the front, to the side, to the back. Then, at last, it became reality: a gallop past his bale, firing three arrows – failure after failure, as usual, until one day all three arrows ended up in the bale. It was, of course, a lucky break; but if it could be done once, it could be done again, a thousand times, a hundred thousand times, given perseverance. That was the moment he first truly felt like a horseback archer.

It had taken four years to get that far, and it was only a beginning. New discoveries lay ahead. Standing archers draw the bow to the cheekbone or chin, often kissing the string, and sighting along the arrow. Kassai tried this for months, until forced to admit that, for archery while on a galloping horse, it was hopeless. All
that tension, the bow drawn, the muscles of the arms and shoulders rigid, the whole body wracked by different motions – how on earth in these circumstances could the rider choose the right moment to release his missile? At one point, he tried to use technology to help him focus. He attached a small laser to an arrow, and tried to keep the spot of red light on the target as he galloped past. To his astonishment, he failed utterly. He couldn’t even get the jiggling spot to remain within a metre of the target, let alone on it. ‘The experiment proved that I knew absolutely everything there was to know about horseback archery,’ he says wrily, ‘with the minor exception of how the arrow manages to hit the centre of the target.’

The answer was first to try drawing the bow, not to the chin, but directly along the line of the outstretched arm, bringing the arrow back to the chest, to the heart, to the seat of the emotions; and second to let the unconscious choose the moment of release. For there is a right moment in the chaos of movement. It comes at that point in the galloping stride when the horse’s four feet are all off the ground at once, a split second in which to find peace. In Kassai’s words, the moment comes ‘at the top of the dead centre of the galloping leap, during the moment we float through the air before the horse’s hoof connects with the ground again’. But the brain has no time to bring this moment into conscious awareness. There can be no thinking, no analysis. There is only action.

How do you aim? You don’t, you can’t, because there’s no time. You leave your mind behind, and you respond by pure feeling.

But to do that demands the right experience, the right information for the brain to work with. As with painting and poetry, feeling is nothing without the technical foundation, the years of experiment and pain and failure and despair. There was in Kassai’s struggle with this unfolding process something of the medieval mystic wrestling with the long, dark night of the soul.

Then he came through, into a sort of paradise.

At dawn I rode my horse at a gallop on the crystal carpet laid by drops of dew and shot arrows damp with the morning mist at my target. The water thrown off the damp arrow almost drew a line through the air. Then I suddenly noticed the fiery rays of the sun burning my face red, everything around me was crackling with dry heat, and the yellow slope of the hill was reverberating with the noontime bells of the neighbouring village.

I was awake in my dreams, dreaming awake. Time melted like sweet honey in morning tea. How much I had searched for that feeling! I had chased it like a little boy who wants to catch a butterfly in a flowery meadow. The wonderful insect zigzags in flight like a sheet of paper blown by the wind, then lands on a fragrant flower. The child catches up with it, panting with the effort and reaches towards it with a clumsy move to hold it between finger and thumb, but the butterfly flits away, and the boy is running, stumbling after it again.

I had the butterfly in my hand. I enclosed it between my palms, careful not to hurt its fragile wings. The
winds of change flowed through me as I awaited the moment when I could turn all my powers towards a new challenge.

The challenge was to be totally serious about mounted archery, which was now life itself – literally: he would, he says, die without it. To fund his obsession, Kassai needed income; so he would have to make his personal mission into a business, which meant inventing a new sport, and all the rules to go with it. His valley gave him the dimensions. A 90-metre course, with three targets, each 90 centimetres across, to be shot at once each – forward, sideways and backward – from a gallop that must take no more than sixteen seconds, with expert riders taking eight or nine seconds. But the first shot cannot be fired until 30 metres into the course, and the final target must be hit as quickly as possible with the ‘parting shot’ as the rider gallops away. Three shots in six seconds, a shot every two seconds. To establish his new sport, he needed to make a name for himself, using his own expertise to show what could be done.

His next big idea was this: to ride his horses – he now had eleven – in relay, along the course he had set himself, firing continuously for twelve hours. He closed the valley, shut out the curious, ‘the unfaithful companions, tenacious enemies, two-faced lovers’ – hints here of how difficult it must have been for others to deal with this demanding, uncomfortable zealot – and trained for six months. ‘There was not a single day I did not imagine myself to be in a battlefield. Despite being
alone, I was not lonely for a minute. My imagination peopled the valley with comrades in arms and deadly enemies.’ The challenge opened up new levels of success and freedom. ‘I think life tries us all, but the really lucky ones are the people who choose their own trials, and make them as big as they can possibly bear.’ This was not all for the sake of spiritual exercise, of course: Kassai’s marathon would be used to build up the business side of his operation. It was time to let the world know of the rebirth of mounted archery.

So it happened. The
Guinness Book of Records
, TV and newspapers were informed, helpers and friends called back to hold horses and collect arrows. One June day, at five in the morning, he started, first using the slow horses, firing five arrows in the ten or twelve seconds it took them to gallop the course; then, as the heat built and the hours passed, he switched to the faster horses, which covered the course in less than seven seconds, firing three arrows in each pass. By five in the afternoon, he had galloped 286 laps and fired something over 1,000 arrows. Kassai was catatonic with fatigue, in some altered state of consciousness. Assistants and students tossed him in the air to celebrate his achievement. ‘I shall be forever indebted to them for their enthusiasm,’ he writes, with heavy irony. ‘It took another two hours for me to awaken. Then suddenly, the accumulated fatigue of a decade hit me like molten lead. I showed little sign of activity at the evening dance.’

* * *

F
ifteen years on, Kassai has honed his performance to something approaching perfection. The sport, using his scoring system, is well established and growing. Since the early 1990s several hundred men and women, more every year, have been practising this gruelling skill, first in Hungary, and now also in Germany and Austria, with a few passionate disciples in the United States. At some point these adepts are going to push for the sport to be included in the Olympics.

Todd Delle, from Arizona, discovered Kassai when he conducted a training session in the United States. Suddenly, a long-term interest in archery and riding acquired a new intensity, because he saw that this was more than just a sport. It was a fusion of body and mind, the two reflecting each other, a foundation for dealing with the successes and failures of life itself, ‘for you cannot fully understand success without first understanding failure’. But it’s not just about individual achievement; it’s also about the group, with everyone encouraging everyone else – a collaborative spirit rare in competitive sport. This is as it should be for a skill that underpinned individual and group survival in battle. There are now others who claim to teach horseback archery. ‘Some of these I have met,’ Delle explained. ‘What makes Kassai different is that what he teaches is not simply the mechanics of how to shoot an arrow from the back of a galloping horse.
What he teaches is the heart and soul of a warrior
.’

There you have it. If Kassai is Attila the archer, he is also Attila the leader, in this respect: he has created a group dedicated to a particular end. In Kassai’s case,
the work is all positive, with nothing but a creative effect on both individual and group. He speaks of being a warrior, but is well removed from the brutalities of a warrior’s life. In Attila’s case, there was a whole other dimension. However gruelling the physical hardship, however uplifting the spiritual training, however ecstatic the teamwork, it all led on to conquest, killing, destruction, rape and pillage.

K
assai’s valley is now the centre not simply of a sport but of a cult, of a way of life, and of a self-sustaining business.

The sweeping curve of the valley now holds Kassai’s house – simple, circular, wooden, with furniture carved from tree-trunks; a barn, sweet with the smell of hay, for the two dozen horses; a covered riding school and an arena; two training runs for mounted archery and two butts for standing archery; and, up on a hillside, a Kazakh yurt, where local children come for lessons in living history. With judicious ditching, the marsh has become a lake. In the nearby town, workshops make bows, arrows and saddles. The whole estate is underpinned by trainees – several hundred of them, mainly Hungarian, but also German and Austrian, with a scattering of English and even a few Americans – and their need for equipment.

You can see him at work on the first Saturday of each month. When I was there, the 35 students ranged from near-masters down to a six-year-old boy. There were eleven women. The Huns, after all, had women in their ranks, as the Scythians did, and one of his most adept
pupils is Pettra Engeländer, who runs courses of her own near Berlin. Kassai masters his world like a sergeant-major teaching a martial art. With a crowd of a hundred watching from the arena’s banked sides, the day starts with rigorous drill-work, with three dozen trainees in lines following his actions, stretching arms and necks, moving on to mock-shooting, left leg and arm extended, the other arm pulled to the chest then thrown back in a mock-release to a yell of ‘Hö!’ from Kassai, and an answering ‘Ha!’ from his trainees, then a single pace, a 180-degree turn and the same again, left and right reversed.

‘It’s important to shoot with both hands, to preserve the symmetry. This is not like your English longbow,’ he explained later as we walked across the valley. ‘We have to be prepared to attack equally well from either direction.’

There follow more variations on the same theme – mock-shots in lines, forward, to the side, backwards, with full squats, now to the tap of a shaman’s drum, with Kassai moving up and down the lines – until, after almost an hour, the trainees run to the stable, change into kimono-like warrior robes and reappear with their horses to ride bareback. First they toss bags of hay to each other; then they use the bags to pillow-fight, and staves to slash at posts and spear wooden cut-out figures.

All this is pretty spectacular; but it’s Kassai’s demonstration that the audience has been waiting for, and it is astonishing. Three men stand along the arena, each holding a pole on which is a circular target 90 centimetres
across. Kassai gallops the length of the arena. As he passes, the man starts to run, holding his target aloft a metre or so above his head. Kassai takes six seconds to pass the first running man, during which time he shoots three arrows. Then on past the next – three shots – and the next – another three shots. Eighteen seconds, nine arrows, each released with a Ha!, and all strike true. And then, as an encore, the same gallop, the same men, except this time the men each have two unattached targets. As they run and Kassai gallops past, they throw the targets over their shoulders. Six flying targets, six shots, all within a metre of the runners, and not a single miss. The final runner falls on his knees, as if thanking the gods for his survival, and all line up for a round of applause. Kassai remains as grim as ever.

Later, walking the valley, I saw five trainees firing at targets tossed in the air. I watched for several minutes. Not one of the five scored a single hit. And they weren’t even firing at speed, let alone on horseback.