“Think of the evidence,” she said. “Here are a thousand men exactly, all of them Huns who were all killed apparently on the same day, around the year 450, but not in a battle. They’re at the center of Hun power, where there were hundreds of thousands of allies but no enemies. They were killed without a fight.”
Sam said, “And they were buried with their belongings, including their weapons. They weren’t dishonored or mutilated after death. I think Remi has to be right. They were Attila’s personal bodyguards. They were sent off to bury him and his treasures in a secret place and then divert the river over the tomb so it wouldn’t be found. When they came home, they were killed to prevent them from revealing the location of the burial.”
Remi said, “They’d need at least a thousand men to divert a river. They’d have had to dig across one of the loops to make a shortcut channel.”
Sam said, “They were all heavily armed, all seasoned warriors with healed wounds. Why would they let themselves be killed without even drawing a sword unless—”
“Unless they were fanatically loyal to Attila, like personal bodyguards,” said Remi. “They would feel they were dying with their leader as they had always expected to.”
“Yes, it makes sense. Yes, it fits,” said Albrecht. “But to accept that story would be a terrible mistake. The tomb of Attila would be worth billions. The Huns were like a giant broom sweeping across Asia and Europe, from beyond the Volga to the Seine, taking everything of value with them. If we announce we’ve found the men who buried Attila, this whole region will be dug up in a year. Other artifacts of incalculable value will be destroyed, and nobody will be any closer to finding the tomb than they are now. If you accept the old stories, the job of the guards was to take the body and the treasure far from here.”
“You’re scholars,” Sam said. “I know you can’t falsify your description of the find when you publish it. And as soon as it’s published, others will immediately see what Remi and I see.”
Albrecht looked down at the floor and shook his head. “Arpad Bako thought I might be on the edge of confirming the myth of Attila’s treasure. Should I make him into a genius?”
“But it’s never been about treasure for you,” said Remi. “It’s about uncovering the past. As you already said, this doesn’t bring anybody closer to the treasure. It just confirms one part of the story—that the guards were killed.”
“I know,” Albrecht said. “I just don’t want to help the criminal who kidnapped me to end up with one of the greatest treasures in antiquity.”
“All right,” said Sam. “Now that your find has been secured, Remi and I will begin to pack up to go home. You and the others can release just the information you want to, on your own timetable. But I feel I should remind you that big secrets have a habit of finding their own way out. You and the other archaeologists aren’t the only ones who saw this. So did hundreds of students. Most of them haven’t gone far enough in their studies to interpret what they’ve seen. But in a couple of years, many of them will get curious and start doing research.”
Albrecht threw his hands up in despair. “What would you have me do?”
“What scientists and scholars always do, in the end,” said Remi. “Keep looking, and thinking, with an open mind, and reporting your best interpretation of what you see.”
“You’re right,” said Albrecht. “I know it, and I feel ashamed for being so hesitant. Please don’t leave us yet. If you could keep Bako and his men occupied for a few more days, we could get the finds to the National Archives.”
The next morning, the work at the river continued. Sam and Remi dove in the murky water while Tibor’s friends and relatives continued to level and grade a straight roadbed from the road to the river. All that day Remi and Sam scoured the riverbed for rusted objects of various sizes and shapes, lifting them onto the boat. At the end of the day, as usual, they unloaded the boat and trucked the objects to a storage building at the University of Szeged, always covered with tarps so Arpad Bako’s watchers would be curious without being able to satisfy that curiosity.
In the evening, Sam and Remi joined Albrecht and his colleagues in studying the objects found in the excavation at the field. The remains of warriors that had already been given preliminary examinations, photographed with their possessions, and catalogued were being placed in wooden boxes, to be archived at the Aquineum Museum, part of the Budapest History Museum, which was housed in the huge Károlyi Palace.
Sam and Remi wandered among the skeletons that had been laid out on tables and tarps to be studied and photographed but which had not been professionally examined since they’d been exhumed. At one point, Sam stopped for a moment. He knelt by a skeleton, craning his neck to see the face from another angle.
“What’s wrong?” said Remi.
“Have you ever tried to get people to keep a secret?”
“Sure,” she said. “That’s pretty much how girls spend sixth grade.”
“Ever succeed?”
“No. Once you tell someone that what you’re saying is a secret, that makes it valuable, a commodity to be traded. Once someone says he has a secret, it means he wants to tell. It’s an invitation to nag him until he gives it up.”
“Here are a thousand people who had a secret. Not one of them told?”
“Got to hand it to the Huns,” she said. “They knew it’s hard to talk when you’re headless. We didn’t have that option in sixth grade.”
“Of course. But even if these men all knew they were going to be killed, they still had relatives they would want to help. I can believe they were all fanatically loyal to Attila, but by then he was dead. Without Attila, the Huns were a loose federation. Didn’t even one of these guys hedge his bets?”
“Apparently not or we would have a history course about some other guy who came onto the scene with a boatload of treasure.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Sam said. They walked along the rows of skeletons, passing dozens, then more dozens, a hundred.
“Wait,” said Remi. “Take a look at this one.”
Sam joined her beside the skeleton. The skeleton had a gold ring around his neck like a Celtic torque. Beside him was a sword with a scabbard with silver mountings. He was wearing a vest that had been made of sheepskin. There were but a few wisps of the shaggy wool left on the outside, and the whole inner leather surface had turned a deep brown.
Through the rib cage and past the backbone, they could see something that looked like rows of designs and, below it, a large and elaborate shape. Remi said, “Doesn’t that look like print? And surely that’s a picture of something.”
“Kind of odd,” said Sam. “While he was wearing the vest, you wouldn’t be able to see the designs.”
“Priscus wrote that they wore their leather clothes until they fell off them. The only time you’d see this is after he was a skeleton.”
Sam raised his hand in the air. “Albrecht!” he called. “Can you spare a minute?”
Albrecht came from across the big room and joined them. He looked down. Then he knelt beside the skeleton, moving his head to see the vest through the ribs. Very faintly he breathed, “Oh, no.”
Remi said, “Doesn’t it look like writing?”
“It iswriting,” said Albrecht. “We’ve got to get the vest off him so we can see all of it.” They carefully lifted the upper part of the skeleton, leaving the severed head on the tarp. While Sam held the torso, Remi and Albrecht slipped the vest down off the shoulders and then the arms. They laid it out on the tarp. Albrecht looked at the shapes closely.
“It’s Gothic. It’s an early eastern Germanic language, probably what half of Attila’s troops spoke.”
“Can you read any of it?”
“Quite a lot of it, actually,” he said. “There was a nobleman named Ulfilas who commissioned a translation of the Bible just about when Attila died, so we know a lot of the vocabulary and structure. And it has a lot of similarities to other Germanic languages. In English you say have. In German it’s haben. In Gothic it’s haban. Generally, Gothic retains a zthat German lost. Things like that.”