Miklos Banffy - They Were Divided

They rode over a little bridge, beneath which the river seemed to be giving off wisps of steamy vapour. A kingfisher darted past them with a startled cry, its sapphire-blue plumage drawing a sharp line just above the surface of the water for an instant before it vanished into the deep vegetation beside the river.

‘It’ll soon be winter if that one has arrived,’ remarked Kadacsay in a whisper: and then again they did not speak.

The horses’ hooves made hardly a sound on the soft turf. The landscape before them seemed more and more unreal with tall groups of Austrian pines looking like black islands in a white sea. When they were quite close to the woods in which they would soon be engulfed those orange-coloured rays of the sun that had succeeded in penetrating the mist above cast a pale dove-grey haze over the silver foliage of the poplars and gave a rosy tint to the dense leaves of the undergrowth. It was as if Nature were blushing as she was undressed by the sun.

From the depths of the mysterious woods suddenly came a deep rumbling roar not unlike the roll of some giant drum, or empty wooden barrel, though it clearly came from some living source and not from any dead piece of wood. It was an angry sound, filled with demand and desire, a mating call or a battle cry.

They all stopped and the horses pricked up their ears.

‘It must be a fallow stag,’ whispered Balint. ‘He can’t be far away!’ and he turned his horse and trotted swiftly along a narrow grassy path which led through the wild tangle of willow trees and elders, beneath arches of giant topolya, until they reached the ford. The reeds by the riverbank were tall now and stood like a wall in front of them. A narrow path had been cut through that led down to the flat pebbles below the bank. At that season there was not much water in the sluggish little stream, indeed it barely came up to the horses’ hocks because most of it had been diverted a mile further upstream to drive the mill. The Aranyos was always like this in autumn and it was hard to believe that the mighty torrent to be seen in spring was the same river. Of course the proof was there to see on the further bank, which was a small perpendicular cliff two or three metres high, cut clean like some geological illustration with clear-cut layers of pebbles, dark humus, alternating strands of clay and stones, until finally reaching down to a base level of bluish-coloured slate which had once been the bed of some prehistoric sea.

They followed the path through the reeds and crossed the ford, and now, for the first time, they could look out over the Keresztes plain, the largest in Transylvania, towards the bald slopes of the Mezoseg, broken only by canyons of yellowish clay, with here and there little square patches of vineyard; over to the right to the hills of the Maros and to the left, far, far away, to the vertical line of the Torda cleft. Still further in the distance, almost melting into the clouds, were the soft grey outlines of the Jara range. The plain was bathed in sunshine and in front of them were the great fields of now harvested oats at the sides of which enough ground had been left unploughed for three horses to gallop side by side. These were the autumn training grounds, for here the going was not so hard as it became inside the park itself. Along one side posts marked a six-hundred-metre stretch.

They rode the horses twice round the perimeter of the field, as a preliminary workout, and then tried out the speed of the five-year-old Csalma and the novice Menyet against that of the experienced Honeydew.

Balint, Simon Jäger and one of the stable lads watched from the side. The first try-out went smoothly enough and Csalma kept up with Honeydew without difficulty, even though the mare went full out.

‘She’ll do us proud, my lord,’ said Simon, and then, almost under his breath. ‘I wouldn’t give any of our horses for that spindly goat! At five thousand metres she’d be well behind!’

Gazsi now trotted over to Balint, said a few words of praise for the Denestornya mare and then, signalling to the lad to bring up the young colt that was to be tried out next, cantered back to the starting post. Then something quite unexpected happened.

Young Pisti, the lad, said ‘ Komelo ’ sharply and dug his heels into the colt’s sides to bring him up in line with Gazsi’s thoroughbred and the latter, perhaps believing that the command was for her, or because she was suddenly reminded of those days on the racecourse at Alag which she had so hated, and resented being shouted at once more, put her head between her forelegs, arched her back in a crescent and, turning a full circle, bolted in every direction in the wide open field. Gazsi was taken by surprise and thrown almost at once; but being the horseman he was he landed on his feet without further mishap.

Not so young Pisti! The colt snorted, flung up his tail in a trumpet shape — just like Honeydew — and leapt into the air so that the lad was thrown up like a shooting star and fell to the ground head first.

Both these things happened so quickly that it was like a volcano erupting and the others roared with uncontrollable laughter. Though his mount too tried some tricks of her own Balint managed to canter fairly calmly over towards Gazsi. At the same time Simon Jäger galloped at full speed after the colt, who was heading for home in a panic. It was one of Simon’s great passions to catch bolting horses at full gallop. The last time he had done it had been two years before when Balint had been hunting at Zsuk and Simon had brought up his reserve mount. Whenever he was out riding he always kept a sharp eye out for a fall and then he was off, racing after the riderless mount uphill and downhill, standing upright in his stirrups, not bent forward like jockeys in a race but with his ramrod back as straight as the Hungarian hussars of old. In a second the riderless colt and his pursuer had crossed the river and vanished into the trees beyond.

‘What a bitch!’ cried Gazsi when he had caught Honeydew and remounted. ‘Didn’t she just thr-r-row me again, the horr-r-rible mare!’ But he wasn’t angry; it was all a joke to him, and Balint, looking at the mare with her flattened ears, her mouth drawn back and, in her eyes a wicked-looking twinkle, fancied that it was the same for Honeydew.

The second trial never took place as one of the chef participants had bolted, and so Gazsi and Balint started for home. They turned into the park towards the island of trees called Nagyberek — the Big Wood, and Balint said, ‘Let’s follow the trail through the woods and maybe we’ll get close to the deer. Those fallow stags are completely reckless when in rut, far more so than the red deer. They’re restless as anything and stay out of covert for far longer.’ Then they sent the remaining lad home and the two of them turned into the thick undergrowth.

Now there was hardly a trace left of the morning mists. The sun shone brightly through the tangled mesh of hops and other wild vines, picking up the autumn yellow of the summer’s hemlock stalks and making the dark web of the bishop’s cap creepers look as if it were a grille that protected passers-by from the flames that seemed to shine from the dry grass behind. Here the filtered sunlight picked up the strange contorted bark of a centuries-old tree and the red glow of another, and everywhere there were bright patches interspersed by dark blue strips of shadow. Where there was light it was blinding, and nothing seemed solid and three-dimensional, for the crowns of the giant trees around them cast their shadow at random until even the outlines of the bushes that formed the undergrowth were blurred and insubstantial.

It was still a dream forest, though quite different from what it had been in the thick mist of early morning. Here and there berries gleamed bright red against orange-coloured leaves, the lemon yellow of the maples was mingled with the bronze of the native oaks and everywhere were clutches of tiny berries that shone like black diamonds. There were so many that they might have been floating freely in the air. Sometimes the two riders found themselves crossing small clearings, now vividly green, before plunging once more into the lush jungle-like thickets.