Before we see how it fared with the four travellers, we must glance at what had been taking place in Transylvania, whose warlike inhabitants had been far less apathetic and incredulous than those of Hungary, and at the first note of alarm had raised troops for the Palatine. Héderváry had been despatched, as already mentioned, to close all the passes on the east, and this done, and his presence being required elsewhere, he had departed, leaving merely a few squadrons behind as a guard. He and they both considered it impossible for the Mongols to force a passage on this side, so well had they blocked the roads.
Like most of the fighting men of those days, the Hungarian army received very little in the way of regular pay, and nothing in the way of rations. It lived upon what it could get! and what would have been theft and robbery at any other time, was considered quite lawful when the men were under arms.
The troops lived well at first. To annex a few sheep, calves, oxen, and to shoot deer, wild boar, or buffalo was part of the daily routine, for the forests abounded in game. They were at no loss for wine either, as some of the nobles supplied them from their cellars.
On the whole, therefore, the men were well entertained; and, little suspecting the serious campaign in store, looked forward to a brush with the Mongols as involving little more danger than their favourite hunting expeditions.
And then, one morning they noticed a peculiar sound in the distance. In one way it was familiar enough, for it reminded them of a hunt, but a hunt on such a scale as none of them had ever witnessed yet. For it was as if all the game in the dense, almost impassable forests on the frontier were being driven towards them by thousands of beaters, driven slowly and gradually, but always nearer and nearer.
They wondered among themselves who the huntsmen could be, and thought that the great lords had perhaps called out the peasantry by way of beguiling the time, and that, as the roads were closed against the Mongols, they were coming through the woods.
But there was no shouting, which was remarkable, and they could hear no human voices, nothing but the hollow sound as of repeated blows and banging, which came to them from time to time, when the wind was in a particular quarter, like the mutter of distant storms.
Two days later, this weird and ghastly noise could be heard till dark. No one could imagine what was going on.
But the detachments whose especial duty it was to watch the frontier appeared to be under a spell, for they passed their time in the usual light-hearted way, and went out shooting and hunting in large parties. They had never known the forest so full of game of all sorts before—wild buffalo, bears, wolves, deer, fawns—as it had been since "the woods had begun to talk," as they expressed it.
By the third day the distant sounds had altered their character, and were no longer like the ordinary noise made by sportsmen and their beaters, but more puzzling still.