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Habsburg Captaincy of Balaton-Drava
Former Kingdom of Hungary
1532
The soldier had been with them for as long as the villagers on the outskirts of Egersee could remember. How long no one seemed truly qualified to explain. But they did commiserate on the matter—once every third game of chess on a cold winter evening—and when they did, the answer fell somewhere between "a good while" and "maybe a little too long".
He came down the mountain path very rarely, but always riding a pony—different ponies!—and bearing goods of a suspicious and untoward nature, of an origin he was reticent to describe as he bartered. He seemed smaller then—shabbier—in the light of the midmorning sun than their stories said. His hair faded and flushed with the seasons the way carrots did when they became overripe. His eyes, according to the elderly Eva Kisné, were like a witch's eyes: a clear and startling color that reminded her of Lake Balaton. He had two little birthmarks—no! three! Sara Pál interrupted—scattered across a haggard freckled face that might have been handsomer. There were certainly other young men who drifted in and out of their settlement, but this one was theirs. He always had been, to the best of their recollection. He greeted the villagers with mild pleasantries, and did not seem to mind when the children darted in and out of his shadow, and for all he was beheld to be a clean-shaven soldier of no more than twenty, he often seemed terribly, terribly old.
How did they know that he was a soldier?
To this the villagers offered the stranger some myriad guesses. He carried himself like a soldier. He spoke like a soldier. He'd winked at their mother once in her youth, had hummed a few bars of a saucy military tune at the market. But perhaps most importantly, tellingly, he denied being a soldier and this—both the bishop and the barrelmaker insisted—was the surest sign of his origins."
Yeah? Well what if the man was just another lowlife: a brigand? The villagers were incensed by the mere insinuation, and spat viciously on the ground. A hajdúk is not a criminal, Kalman Almosfi insisted. If their man were a robber, he took only from those who had no business having it anyway. If he were a murderer, well! Who would notice even a smear of black Turkish blood in the valley where hundreds of thousands of Magyars had perished? Murder! Pah! Murder was a crime committed against humans, not Saracens.
It was about this time, when the word "murder" was spoken aloud, that the stranger found himself suddenly under the scrutiny of the entire population of the no-name little village near Egersee. Who the hell was he to inquire after one of their own? What authority did he have as a foreigner—surely by the way he swallowed his R's—to pass judgment on their mountain soldier? Did he mean to arrest or interrogate him?
"What? Fuck no." And this was the truth, never mind that any other answer would surely have seen him wrung by the neck. "Look, all I want is two words with the—"
"You won't find him!" shouted a passel of nine year old scamps. "We'll tell him! We'll tell him you're here! He won't come!"
"Fuck's sake you loud little shits, just give h—im a MESSAGE." the stranger barked at the little lynch mob gathering round him. "Tell your... soldier that a loudmouthed asshole from Königsburg is gonna be waiting for him by the river."
At this rate, probably in a ditch.
Prussia did indeed find himself pitching his tent by the Zala, but thankfully with a bedroll instead of a shallow grave. After being manhandled by several Hungarian grandmothers he had managed to bribe one of the more adventurous urchins to carry his peace offering forth. Now, he was committed to waiting in the trust that the stupid kid didn’t run off with the money, and that when Egersee's soldier came down from the mountain, it would be her.
It was a long shot to think that Hungary would be out here in the wilderness, so close to the border, but in truth as long as he’d known her he had been certain of one thing exactly: Hungary did not care for walls. In the wake of the Ottoman invasions the town of Egersee, its constellation of villages, and what little remained of her free country had begun fortifying itself like the goddamn fucking Pyrenees. And sure, the villagers would probably be safer behind the walls of the palisade but Erszé? She would rather roam in the hills like a wolf.
Prussia kept the gun within arm’s reach as he tended the fire, just in case his hunch about this particular outlaw proved to be wrong. He had been mistaken before—had lost no small sum of money luring a few hajduks to determine if any of them were Hungary in disguise. In Raab he had buried one or two of the meaner ones, because all things considered Prussia had never much liked being murdered, and was not expecting a change of heart anytime soon.
A low whistle drifted in on the breeze, rousing his horse. Prussia looked up to see a rider approach by the left, some ten meters away. And in the little fading light he could make out the familiar, spotty face of a friend who had no business being here. He raised himself to his feet. Whistled back as watched her clamber off of her horse with a graceless swagger, encumbered by the weight of an oversized coat and a colorful assortment of Ottoman guns. At first she stood at the edge of the light, circled the ring of fire with a predatory uncertainty, and when Prussia rose to his feet to meet her halfway, she lunged.
The force and momentum of Hungary's weight and her plunder buckled his knees, nearly threw the both of them backwards into the creek, and expelled all of the air from his lungs in a single bark of rough laughter. Her hair was grimier than a goat's and it clung together in strands as he pressed his nose into it. Her breath smelled like dirt and raw garlic and misery. And holy fuck, had he missed her, and until that moment he'd never allowed himself to appreciate fully how much.
“Haven’t seen a woman around, have you?" Prussia whispered. "She’s about your height, but uglier.”
Hungary made a noise that sounded a hell of lot like a growl, gripping him tighter, so tightly in fact that he felt more than one pistol pressing dangerously into his ribs. Prussia wheezed his displeasure and was ignored. It was only when she let go that he got a really good look at her, and first impressions hadn’t been wrong. She was dirtier than he remembered; there was hunger in the hollow bones of her cheeks, and a skittishness to the way that she moved.
"You want me to start? I can start.” Prussia offered, lowering himself down by the fire. “Let’s skip the part where you pretend like you don’t know I'm here for your ass.”
She knelt heavily next to him, muted by the noise of hidden coin purses and powder horns. "Yeah? On whose orders?"
"Nobody's. Mine." he sighed heavily, and loosened his coat. "But I do have a letter somewhere underneath all this shit." He could feel her eyes following him and the movement of his hands.
“How the fuck did you find me?” she asked.
"I know you." Prussia feigned modesty with a sway of his shoulders and chin. "Figured if I were you, it wouldn't occur to me to do the EASY thing, or the sensible thing. No, I wouldn't just show up at court: I'd rather live on the fucking fringe of society like a criminal in disguise. Might even take up revenge killing and robbery—tell me how I'm doing so far."
"Wonderfully," said Hungary, offering several rude gestures in rapid succession. Prussia smirked and continued to pat himself down.
"Right? So I started in Preßburg and worked my way south. Every little backwater village where weird fuckers congregate. Took me... Nine misses before I finally found you."
Her gaze drifted away into the treeline, but he recognized something not unlike a smile. "You are so full of shit."
"Or," Prussia shrugged, producing a matted envelope from his breast pocket. "Maybe I started with a list of suspiciously clean-shaven Hungarian outlaws. Narrowed it down. I'm not exactly here in any official capacity."
He folded the paper into her hand; her eyes fell the seal. Hungary recoiled violently. "What the fuck, Gilbert?" she whispered. The Viennese eagle, its waxy outline deformed by the long years in his coat, crumpled pitifully in her fist.
"Just read it before you start yelling at me."
Her teeth shone dangerously in the firelight. "He sent me a summons?"
"An offer."
"Of WHAT?" she hissed, dropping Austria's letter into the grass at his feet.
Prussia stared down at the paper. "An alliance." Hungary did not make a move to retrieve it: neither did he. "It says: come to Vienna—legitimize Ferdinand as the rightful ruler of Hungary—and the Habsburgs will give you an army."
"Jesus Christ." She shifted away from him, away from the fire, drawing her coat and her arsenal more tightly around herself. "Whose side are you fucking on?"
The words barely escaped through the gap in his teeth. "The side that wants to keep you alive." Prussia swore, crushing a handful of wildflowers as he dug his fingernails into the dirt. "Do you think I'm fucking happy about this? You think I want to see Austria wearing your crown? But those were the terms your people agreed to, when they married your children to his." He caught himself just in time as Hungary's nostrils flared violently. "And this—" he eyed the letter. "This is the best chance that you've got right now. You can't keep fighting the Turk all by yourself, Ungarn. You just can't."
That she had made it as long as she had went unsaid. Prussia, for his part, threw another branch into the fire and Hungary, for her own, a dry, dirty-looking crust of bread from one of her endless pockets and jammed it defiantly into her mouth. "How many times did Austria fucking promise me aid?" she swallowed, with difficulty. "We had an alliance by marriage. He gave me a queen, rallied the Pope and the Vatican, called me the Hero of Christendom—and when Suleiman landed? He left us to die."
"So don't die."
"You make it sound EASY." she laughed, bitterly.
"It can be." The branch snapped, and Prussia repositioned his legs.
"You and I have different definitions of easy, I think."
"So promise him aid, like he promised you."
She took another bite of her rye and didn't acknowledge him.
"Go to Vienna." saying those words sprained more than one reluctant muscle in his jaw. "Accept the terms. Promise him you'll denounce the pretender Zápolya and swear your allegiance to Ferdinand. And then take his men, take his silver-lined purse, and USE Austria to take back what the Saracen stole from you."
Hungary stared at the ground, flicked her wrist lazily, and gestured at him with her dirty bread. "Got anything I can wash this down with?"
"Yeah. Wine."
She took the flask from him, drank deeply, and made a noise of disgust. "Got anything better?"
Prussia jabbed his thumb at the river, where Hungary's untethered horse was placidly drinking. Hungary looked at him, at the flask, and back at him. "I guess this'll do." she said, and tipped the rest of it into her mouth. It was backwash. Shit was hardly stronger than breakfast beer on a good day, never mind for someone of her constitution, but Prussia didn’t mind the way it seemed to set her at ease when she slumped onto the ground on her belly, staring into the flames. He tried to run a hand through her hair but didn’t make it far before hitting a swallow’s nest of tangles, and extracting his fingers completely.
Prussia cleared his throat. “Hey uh. You gonna tie up that horse?”
“He’ll be fine.” Hungary replied. “He knows to stay close.”
"And what about you?"
“What about me?” she asked sullenly.
“You gonna stay close to me, Ungarn?”
She grunted. He figured it was some sort of response.
The morning was damp and unpleasantly quiet when Prussia awoke, fully resigned to the possibility of Hungary having crept away into the night. But to his surprise she was there, sitting crosslegged in the grass on the riverbank, reading Austria's letter and drinking the last of his wine. She didn’t try to make her escape when he wandered away for a piss, and she shook her head slowly, drunkenly, when he came back to offer her breakfast out of his pockets.
"You’re coming with me,” she said without looking up at him. Not even a question. Prussia had never expected anything less.
He kicked loose dirt over the ashes of yesterday’s fire and nodded triumphantly. "You're damn right I am. Wouldn't miss a chance to see you in all of your glory."
"Glory, huh?" she scoffed. She stood, gathering her hair into a mass over which she folded her cap. "I guess you could call it that."
They didn't pass through the village and they didn't pass through the town. Hungary steered them north, into the hills, muttering witchery to her horse. Prussia contemplated the countryside as Hungary contemplated the devil knew what. The river kept going and going, like there'd never even been a war. She started to trail behind him after awhile: never too far, but just out of sight. He didn't ask why so long as he could hear the steady gait of her horse and the faint sound of her heartbeat, and that seemed to suit her just fine. They lost sight of the Zala. Hills all around. Here and there: people. At the crest of a grassy slope he caught sight of a handful of dirty children herding their sheep. He knew she must have felt them too because she squared her shoulders and didn't look back.
The pace they kept was staggering, undisciplined and not particularly urgent. It chafed at the orderly part of his brain, though not nearly so much as his Catholic conscience did. It whispered to him in the night. Turn around, it said as her sleeping head butted against Prussia's back: let her go, let her find her own way out of this mess. But that was it, wasn't it? Hemmed in by the Turks, by the mountains, by Janos Zapolya negotiating which parts of her he could keep for himself, she had run out of options. She had survived so far, but this wasn't living.
At any rate, this was what Prussia told himself, every morning that he looked at her sitting solemn and straight in the saddle. He wished she would kick him.
It was about this time, when the sun was high, that she stopped and dismounted. They stood at the edge of an embankment—high, but not terribly steep. Prussia looked at her questioningly. "There are better places to piss."
She smiled—good sign.
"You alright?"
"Yeah..." Hungary kicked a small stone and watched it roll out of sight. "Yeah. I guess this is it."
Prussia blinked. "It's definitely it's a valley."
"But it isn't mine." She peeled off her high feathered cap and let it fall at her side. There was a breeze.. "You can't feel it I guess. This isn't your border. This, right here? This is me. And over there where the hills start to climb?" She drew a line in the air with her finger. It fell in some indeterminate spot. "That's Austria."
"Hmm," Prussia hopped off the saddle to stand next to her, arms folded over his chest. "You know what I take it back. Soon as we get over there, you can piss."
Hungary bumped him. She seemed almost happy, until Prussia decided to open his mouth.
"We should get going." he said.
Hungary didn't move.
"Ungarn.”
"It seemed further away when we were in Egersee."
But it hadn't been. Wasn't even two hundred kilometers between Vienna and her hidey-hole in the Keszthely mountains. She had had years to make it across.
"Erszé," he said. She curled into her name like a palm cupping her cheek. "What the fuck happened to you after Mohács?"
Her knuckles were stark against fox fur as she stared straight ahead. "Gilbert" she said, her voice tinny and strange. The rest she didn't say, but he heard it anyway: I'm warning you, Gilbert. Don’t push.
He did though. “You didn’t... get caught.”
Hungary shook her head. “No."
And she wouldn't have run until it was over.
"Then why didn't you go home to Buda?" he asked.
He could see blood gathering in blotches of rotten wine under her skin: tired and wounded and angry. "Would you?"
That wasn't a question for him. Of course he would have. He had responsibilities. So did she. You try, you die, you rise again; follow the chain of command as far back as it goes. You mourn your king and your bishops and your men and you don't lose your bearings, even if you're the only one left.
But Hungary laughed. She was a low, grinding, storm that scattered over the valley. "I couldn't even bring back his body." she said. "Louis. Lajoska. Somebody got to him before I did. I wasn't... I hadn't come BACK yet, and by the time that I DID they had already buried him, at the basilica in Székesfehérvár." The earth was cooler where her shadow fell at his feet. It crawled up his legs as she drew herself to full height. "So tell me, Gilbert." she said. "How do you go home after that? How the fuck do you tell his sister that he's gone because YOU couldn't protect him?"
He grabbed her by the lapels without even thinking, as gently as he'd ever known HOW, until she was facing him. "Stop it. Look at me. LOOK at me, Erszé. Your king died like a soldier. He died leading YOU—"
"You never HELD him!" she roared. "You weren't THERE when he came into this world!" The sound of her burst, and it punctured his lungs. "I butchered every fucking animal I could find for the sake of a warm body to cover him with—just to keep him ALIVE! I was there at his wedding and Anna's when they had no mother or father to witness them! They were my—he was my—he was twenty years old, Gilbert! And I let him DIE!"
He pressed his forehead to hers, near cross-eyed as she held him like a vice by the shoulders. "Jesus," he whispered. Nearly a decade, she had been mired in this. She should have gone home, while it stood. But Buda was gone. Esztergom, gone. Everything east of Lake Balaton: gone. Nothing was left of it all but the woman herself, sitting on a sliver of the Western Hungarian Range. "Now say your rosary, Ungarn, and go where your Anna is waiting."
Hungary choked incredulously. It was a living, beautiful sound. "What the fuck. Are you—FUCK. You are not my fucking confessor—"
"Yeah well." he shrugged. "It's not God's love you're looking for." And she held. Her bone-crushing grip was its own sort of comfort, a reassurance that he hadn't fucked up in any strictly unfixable way. "She turned out okay, you know."
"I know." Hungary said, as if it had never occurred to her to doubt.
Little Anna of Hungary, Archduchess of Austria.
“You didn’t really think I brought you that letter as a favor to Roderich, did you?”
She was silent, but he felt the land tremble.
“I want you to live, Ungarn.” Prussia said, as softly as he knew how. “A lot of people do. But some of them in particular.”
Hungary nodded and let go of him.
"You ready?"
"Fuck no.” she sighed, as she mounted her horse.
There was a crowd on the balcony of Schönbrunn and like any congregation of Austrians, it made Prussia a little uneasy. He hadn’t planned on a grand entrance of any sort, but it seemed that the man at the gate had sent somebody ahead. A handful of guards crowded the steps and above them, the Habsburg patriarch Ferdinand, sporting a beard that you could pick out from a thousand yards. He was flanked by his councilors and by Austria himself, holding Ferdinand's five-year-old son.
“When’s the last time you had an audience like that?” he asked.
Hungary stared straight ahead. “When I evicted their predecessors.”
And Prussia could feel her as they did, for a moment: the last member of Matthias Corvinus’s dreaded Black Army, and the bearer of hegemony over Hungary’s crown lands. She patted her stolen pony and looked at him, grimly. “Think they’ll let me ride up the steps again?”
“Probably not.”
The first collective shudder among the palace guard was what finally stopped her. Hungary straightened her back, readjusted her hair, and hopped down from the saddle. It didn’t make her any less intimidating, even with a good distance between them. She turned back to him. Placed her arm over his. Lingered a moment. Prussia gripped the stirrups precariously as he leaned sideways, nearer to face level with her. "So,” he said casually.
She slurred the word when she repeated it. "So?"
"Promises, Ungarn. What the hell did we talk about? Your flag over Esztergom by this time next spring."
"Jesus, Gilbert." she scoffed, not unhappily.
He gripped her hand. "And when you get it back, put that shit somewhere high. I want to see it flying, all the way from the Baltic."
She squeezed back.
“Erszé,” he said. The rest, he just gestured.
A woman had emerged from the crowd of old men at the railing. She drifted, ashen-faced, solid, to the left with each footfall quicker than the last. Ferdinand caught her round the waist, mouthed words in her ear that no one could hear; she shoved him aside without even a glance. Anna Jagiellonica threw herself down the stairs, skipping step after step with her skirts drawn halfway to her chest, and men parted before her. The last thing that Prussia saw was Hungary's face crumpling as she was engulfed.
He knew only the odd second word in her language, but Prussia knew the sound of a hallelujah better than most. Anna's feverish laughter that cried out for Ungarn and Mary and Jesus and "No! No, Erszé I’m pregnant no don't pick me UP!" as her toes left the ground and went flying. Anna knocked the hat from her head. Her lips smeared the wet, salty grime running down Hungary's face. Hungary didn't say anything. Those weren’t words. But everyone heard her: the dead and the living and all of Vienna and maybe even the Turk in his palace in Istanbul.
God damn, but the woman knew how to howl.
Though in caves pursued they lie,
Even then they fears attacks.
Coming forth the land to spy,
Even a home they find they lack.
Mountain, vale – go where they would,
Grief and sorrow all the same –
Underneath a sea of blood,
While above a sea of flame.
—Ferenc Kölcsey, Himnusz
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