“The more we do what Bako and his people think is getting us closer to the underwater tomb, the more they’ll ignore Albrecht and the others.”

Tibor said, “We may have Bako all confused and frustrated now, but don’t let it make you too comfortable. He has enough men to do many bad things at once.”

They spent several days on their magnetometer survey of the lower river. Each evening, they went to see Albrecht and his team at the building in the city center that they had rented as a lab.

“It’s definitely a battlefield,” said Albrecht.

“How could it be anything else?” said Enikö Harsányi. “So far, we’ve found six hundred fifty-six adult male bodies, all armed, and all apparently killed together and then buried where they fell.”

Imre Polgár said, “Many of them—perhaps a majority—show signs of having serious wounds that had healed. We found impact fractures, stab and slash wounds that hit bone. These were career fighters. The term should probably be warriors rather than soldiers.”

“And who are they?” asked Remi.

“They’re Huns,” said Albrecht.

“Definitely Huns,” Enikö Harsányi agreed. “All of them so far.”

“How can you tell?” Sam asked. “DNA?”

Albrecht took them to a long row of steel tables, where skeletons lay in a double row. “There isn’t a DNA profile of a Hun. The core group in the first and second centuries were from Central Asia. As they came west, they made alliances with or fought, defeated, and absorbed each tribe or kingdom they met. So by the time they were here on the plains of Hungary, they still had many individuals with genes in common with Mongolians, but others who appeared to be Scythian, Thracian, or Germanic. What they shared wasn’t common ethnicity but common purpose. It’s like asking for the DNA profile of a seventeenth-century pirate.”

“So how do you identify them?”

“They were horsemen. They traveled, fought, ate, and sometimes slept on horseback. We can tell by certain skeletal changes that all of these men spent their lives on horses. But there’s much more conclusive evidence.”

“What’s that?” Sam asked.

“The Huns weren’t regular cavalry, they were mounted archers. In Asia they developed this tactic with the help of an advance in the bow and arrow.”

He very carefully picked up a blackened piece of wood with irregular curves. “Here it is. It’s a compound bow, and the style is distinctive. See the ends where you nock the string? They’re called siyahs. They’re stiff, not flexible. The wood isn’t just a piece of wood. It’s layers of laths glued together. There are always seven siyahs, made of horn, and the grip is bone. It made for a very short bow that they could use on horseback and it gave much greater velocity to the arrow. This is probably as good a specimen of a Hun bow as exists today. So far, we’ve found over four hundred of them.”

“Huns against who?” asked Sam.

“That, I’m afraid, is a more difficult question. The victims were all over the field together. They were laid out with no separation for affiliation, simply covered with earth where they fell. They all had the sort of armament that a Hun would use, primarily the compound bow. They also carried a long, straight, double-edged sword in a scabbard that hung from the belt, and a short sword, or dagger, stuck horizontally in the belt. They wore goatskin trousers and a fabric or fur tunic. Some had leather vests.”