Three years went by ere the Szeklers were again hard pressed by their enemies. This time their countrymen were already so far away that only the wind could reach them in the distant east, but they came again, and a third time delivered their brethren.
The Szeklers had now peace for many years; the nut-kernels they had planted in the land beyond the forest had meanwhile sprouted and developed to mighty trees with spreading branches and massive trunks; children had grown to be old men, and grandchildren to arms-bearing warriors; and the provisionary watch-post had become a well-organized settlement. But once again the neighbors, envying the strangers’ welfare, and having forgotten the assistance which always came to them in hour of need, rose up against them. Bravely the Szeklers fought, but with such inferior numbers that they could not but perish; they had no longer any hope of assistance, for their brethren were long since dead, and gone where no messenger could reach them.
But the star of the Szeklers yet watched over them, and brought the tidings to another world.
The last battle was just being fought, and the defeat of the Szeklers seemed imminent, when suddenly the tramp of hoofs and the clank of arms is heard, and from the starlit vault of heaven phantom legions are seen approaching.
No mortal army can resist an immortal one. The sacred oath has been kept; once more the Szekler is saved, and silently as they came the phantoms wend back their way to heaven.
Since that time the Szekler has obtained a firm hold on the land, and enemies molest him no more; but as often as on a clear starry night he gazes aloft on the glittering track[68] left of yore by the passage of the delivering army, he thinks gratefully of the past, and calls it by the name of the hadak utja (the way of the legions).
Recent historians have, however, swept away these theories regarding the Szeklers’ origin, and explained it in different fashion. The most ancient records of the Magyars do not date farther back than the sixth century after Christ, when they are mentioned as a semi-nomadic race living on the vast plains between the Caucasian and Ural mountains. A portion of them quitted these regions in the eighth and ninth centuries to seek a new home in the territory between the rivers Dnieper and Szereth. From here a small fraction of them, pressed hard by the Bulgarians, traversed the chain of Moldavian Carpathians, and found a refuge on the rich fertile plains of Eastern Transylvania (895), where, living ever since cut off from their kinsfolk, they have formed a people by themselves. According to the most probable version, these fugitives would seem to have been the women, children, and old men, who, left unprotected at home in the absence of the fighting-men of the horde, had thus escaped the vengeance of Simeon, King of Bulgaria.
“At the frontier,” or “beyond,” is the signification of the Hungarian word Szekler, which therefore does not imply a distinctive race, but merely those Hungarians who live beyond the forest—near the frontier, and cut off from the rest of their countrymen. One Hungarian authority tells us that the word Szekler, meaning frontier-keeper or watchman, was indiscriminately applied to all soldiers of whatever nationality who defended the frontier of the kingdom.
Later, when the greater body of Hungarians had established their authority over this portion of the territory as well, the two peoples fraternized with each other as kinsfolk, descended indeed from one common family tree, but who had acquired certain dissimilarities in speech, manner, and costume, brought about by their separation; and despite sympathy and resemblance on most points, they have never quite merged into one nationality, and the Szeklers have a proverb which says that there is the same difference between a Szekler and a Hungarian as there is between a man and his grandson—meaning that they themselves came in by a previous immigration.