Shadow of a Hero Read online

  The wave of energy died and left him trembling worse than before. If Letta and Nigel hadn’t been holding him he might have fallen. Letta was concentrating on him, and only vaguely aware of Mollie turning and beckoning, and then a taxi pulling up. They helped him in, and climbed in after him.

  ‘We’re taking you to hospital for a check-up,’ said Mollie.

  ‘No,’ murmured Grandad. ‘Wait, please.’

  ‘I really think . . .’

  ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘We will wait, Mollie.’

  She didn’t like it, but she did what he said. He leaned back on the seat and closed his eyes. The meter ticked. The robot policeman came over, wanting to move them on, but Mollie climbed out and persuaded him not to. It didn’t look that difficult. Letta guessed that somebody must have told him what had happened on the Embassy steps. The Varinians were allowing themselves to be shepherded out into the road and back behind the barriers. Mr Orestes was handing out leaflets to the reporters and anyone else who would take them.

  When all the protesters were back in place, Grandad climbed out and, leaning on Letta’s shoulder, went down the line, shaking hands with them in turn. Some of them, men as well as women, began to cry. He was moving very feebly and trembling badly by the time she got him back to the taxi, but he still refused to go to hospital.

  ‘For hours they will make us wait,’ he said. ‘Much quicker that I go home.’

  ‘Well, you’re probably right there,’ said Mollie. ‘Can you spot your driver, Letta?’

  ‘I’ll get him.’

  ‘If he’s put the car into a multi-storey don’t let Grandad out of the taxi till he’s got it down and Grandad can get straight in. Sure you can manage? Here’s a tenner for the fare, and another for emergencies. And put him to bed as soon as you get in, and get the doctor round. No, I’ll call Momma at work and tell her to lay that on. Sure you don’t want me to come with you?’

  As they drove away she heard the protesters starting to sing again, a folk-song, but one she didn’t know, not at all like ‘The Two Shepherds’, wild and fierce. They sang it as though they meant it.

  LEGEND

  The English Milord

  FOR THE DEATH of his son the Pasha of Potok put a price on the head of Restaur Vax, of a hundred and seventy pieces of gold, and seventy also on the head of Lash the Golden, but Lash laughed when they told him the news.

  ‘For these nine years,’ he said, ‘I have slept with a price on my head, and my dreams have been all the sweeter.’

  Now Restaur Vax fell ill of a fever, so Lash carried him to a farm where he could lie concealed. A great storm blew down from the north, and an English Milord,1 travelling past that way, sent his guide to the door to ask for shelter. This guide was a Greek. The Milord brought with him two horses, a black and a bay, while the Greek rode a pony.

  The farmer’s wife put food and wine before the Milord and he ate, and that done he settled to playing dice for pastime, left hand against right. Now above all else in life Lash loved three things, a hard fight, a fine woman, and the rattle of dice on the board. Moreover, he thought in his heart, ‘If we are to fight the Turks we must have horses. There are two here for the taking, with St Joseph’s aid.’2

  When he made his offer the Milord laughed.

  ‘My horses are worth more than a peach and an olive,’ he said. ‘What will you stake against them?’

  Lash laid on the table the first of the Bishop’s rings, which Restaur Vax had given him. The Milord examined it and accepted it as a fair stake. So they played, and the Milord won, and won the second ring also in the same manner. Then Lash climbed to the loft where Restaur Vax lay in his fever and took from his wallet the four remaining rings, and staked them.

  First he staked a ring of fine gold, set with blue lapis carved to the shape of a dolphin. That he lost.

  Next he staked a ring of fine gold set with chrysoprase. That he lost.

  Third he staked a ring of silver entwined with gold, of marvellous workmanship. That he lost also.

  Last he staked a ring of fine gold set with a ruby and three diamonds.

  ‘This is worth more than a single horse,’ he said.

  ‘Then I will stake my guide’s pony also,’ said the Milord.

  But Lash desired both the Milord’s horses, so he said, ‘The pony is no more than a skeleton with a mangy hide.’

  ‘Not so,’ said the Milord. ‘She is a sturdy mare, not six years old. Come to the barn and see.’

  They took the lantern and went out to the barn, where the horses were stabled, and there they found that the pony was gone, and its saddle and harness too. The Milord called for his guide, but the Greek did not answer.

  Lash said, ‘This man saw me and knew who I am, for I am Lash the Golden and there is a price on my head. He has taken the pony and ridden to Varni, where there are Turkish bazouks. I must take my companion and go, for there is a price on his head also. But first, since the stakes are set, let us throw the dice one more time. Then with St Joseph’s aid we will have horses to ride, for my companion is sick and cannot walk, and without horses I must carry him on my back.’

  The Milord agreed and they rolled the dice on the floor of the barn, and once again Lash lost.

  But as he stood up and prepared to go the Milord said, ‘Wait. I do not love the Turks, and you have played honourably with me, neither cursing your luck nor accusing me of cheating, as most men would have done after such a run on the dice. Moreover you need at least one horse to carry your companion. I will stake either one against a single hair of your beard.’

  So the stakes were agreed and they rolled the dice for the last time, and now Lash won.

  ‘Now choose,’ said the Milord. ‘The black is the better bred and the better looking, but he was bred in the plains. The bay was bred among mountains, and has the heart of a lion.’

  ‘Then I will take the bay,’ said Lash.

  He fetched Restaur Vax down from the loft and wrapped him well against the storm and put him on the bay horse and took him by goat-paths and the paths of the hunter to a cave that he knew of on Mount Athur. But first he bound the Milord and the farmer and his wife with cords, so that they could tell the Turks that they had been forced into all they did.

  When Restaur Vax woke in the cave on Mount Athur the fever was gone and he knew himself.

  ‘What horse is that?’ he said.

  ‘He is yours,’ said Lash the Golden. ‘I paid a Milord for him, with the four rings which the Bishop gave you for that purpose. He was bred among mountains and has the heart of a lion.’

  1 In one version of this legend the Milord is identified as Milord Byron. Byron, though sympathetic to the Varinian cause (cf letter to Hobhouse 19 Feb 1822), did not in fact at any time visit Varina.

  2 St Joseph is the patron saint of Varina. His bones and a chisel said to be his are kept as sacred relics in the cathedral at Potok. The story is that Our Lord was in the workshop one day when Joseph swore at a knot in the timber on which he was working. At that, his chisel leaped in his hand and cut him to the bone. Then Our Lord, having rebuked his father for his intemperance, touched the wound and healed it, and then touched the timber and made the grain straight. Hence the Varinian belief that to swear by St Joseph is not accounted blasphemous.

  WINTER 1989

  GRANDAD STAYED IN bed for two days. Momma tried to unplug his telephone, but he wouldn’t let her.

  ‘I must speak my own words,’ he said, ‘or people will put words that were never mine into my mouth.’

  There were photographs of the vigil in some of the papers, two of Grandad almost falling down the steps and one of him being helped away by Nigel and Letta, and two of the singing. The Independent had a six-inch news report as well, and next day the Guardian actually mentioned Varina in a leader about the Balkans, saying it was one of the problems to which there weren’t any right answers, but that didn’t excuse the filthy way the Romanians were behaving. Some of the kids at school brought copies of th
e photographs along, which meant that people who didn’t have any special reason to be interested in Varina must have noticed.

  On Thursday when Letta took the tea up she heard voices before she reached the top of the stairs, so she knocked and waited till Grandad called to her to come in. It wasn’t Mr Jaunis’s day, but he was there and so was Mr Orestes. Without his fur hat you could see that his head really was absolutely shiny bald, which made him look creepier than ever.

  ‘I’ll just get another cup, so there’s three,’ said Letta, assuming that Grandad wouldn’t want her to stay. The visitors obviously thought the same, but Grandad said, ‘We will need two more cups. I cannot expect either Mr Jaunis or Mr Orestes to toast my crumpet to your standards. Did you meet Mr Orestes on Tuesday? No? Hector, this is my granddaughter, Letta.’

  Mr Orestes rose and waited while she put the tray down so that he could shake hands with her formally, bowing his head as he did so.

  ‘Orestes like in the goat-boy book?’ she said. ‘Anya Orestes?’

  ‘My grandmother,’ he said, in a slightly whining voice.

  ‘Like us, Hector suffers from the burden of a literary ancestor,’ said Grandad. ‘Now, my darling, if you would be kind enough to bring two more cups and then toast my crumpet, we will continue to settle the future condition of Europe.’

  She went and returned, bringing extra hot water as well. She poured the tea, refilled the pot and settled by the fire. Mr Orestes accepted a crumpet which he ate with lashings of butter on it. Letta listened to the discussion and did her best to understand. They were talking about how to follow up on the vigil. In spite of what had happened to Grandad – or rather, because of it – the vigil had made much more of a splash than anyone could have hoped, and people who’d never heard of Varina now knew it was there, and real.

  They were talking about some kind of delegation to a minister at the Foreign Office, and who should be on it. The problem for Letta was that she didn’t know any of the names, which made it all a bit meaningless, but after a bit she noticed that as soon as either Mr Jaunis or Mr Orestes suggested somebody, the other one would come up with a reason against them. Mr Jaunis was jolly and giggly about this, and Mr Orestes was sour and cold, so it was odd that it was something Mr Jaunis said – the way he said it, more – that suddenly made Letta understand that neither of them was very interested in the delegation for itself but they both were trying to use it to do the other one down. They needed a British MP to lead the delegation and there were two possible choices. Mr Jaunis wanted one, so naturally Mr Orestes wanted the other. Grandad suggested a joint leadership.

  Mr Jaunis giggled and said, ‘The difficulty about that, I’m afraid, is that the two gentlemen happen to detest each other.’

  With a slight shudder of shock, Letta saw that the two who truly detested each other were Mr Jaunis and Mr Orestes. She didn’t much like either of them herself, but this was different. It was different even from the sort of feud you get between a couple of kids at school, not speaking to each other, letting everyone know how much they despise each other, being generally mean, but all still as a kind of trying-it-out-to-see-if-it-fits exercise, a nasty little game. The way Mr Jaunis and Mr Orestes hated each other was real. It filled the room like a horrible smell. Surely Grandad could smell it too.

  Grandad never drank more than one cup of tea, but she took the teapot over to his bed and pretended to offer him a refill. He hadn’t finished his first, and he’d only eaten half his crumpet and let the rest go cold. He was sitting up in bed and leaning back against the piled pillows with his head held straight, glancing at each of the visitors in turn as they spoke, making notes on his clipboard. He looked alert enough to anyone who didn’t know him well, pretty spry for eighty-one, in fact, but Letta could see he was forcing himself to stay like that, and really he was feeling almost as bad as when she and Nigel had got him into the taxi.

  She turned and waited for a pause in the argument, feeling herself going red.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, too loudly. ‘Grandad’s not feeling well.’

  Mr Orestes had just been going to say something. He half turned his head and looked at her like an angry snake. Mr Jaunis gave a surprised giggle.

  ‘The doctor said we mustn’t let him get tired,’ she stammered. ‘Momma – my mother – she’ll be very upset, if . . . I mean . . . and you want him well too, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m afraid Letta is right,’ said Grandad’s voice behind her. ‘I apologize for my feebleness, gentlemen, after you have come all this way, but we had better not risk my daughter’s wrath. Since we have reached an impasse over the leadership of the delegation I propose to resolve the matter as follows. I have a list here of the names we have agreed for the Varinian delegates, and I will write to Mr Craigforth and Mr Weller suggesting a joint delegation. I will do a draft in time to post it to each of you tomorrow, so that you can telephone me with suggestions, if any – I trust that will not be necessary – in time for Mr Jaunis to bring me the typed-up letters to sign on Monday. We will give tomorrow a miss, Teddy. I trust that is agreeable to you both, gentlemen?’

  It obviously wasn’t, but they had to put up with it. Letta thought about Grandad as she took them downstairs. He wasn’t anything official. He’d just been Prime Minister of Varina for a fortnight over forty years ago, and even in that fortnight nobody except the Varinians had considered it to be a real country – no-one else wanted to know about it. But still, when he told Mr Jaunis and Mr Orestes what he’d decided, they knew that was it.

  She closed the front door behind them with a sigh of relief, and heard Mr Orestes’ voice, low but venomous, before they reached the garden gate. Mr Jaunis answered with his infuriating giggle. He did it on purpose, she decided.

  When she went to collect the tray she found Grandad had eased himself down the pillows and was lying with his eyes closed. But he wasn’t asleep.

  ‘Thank you, my darling,’ he said. ‘You did very well. I would myself have asked them to go before long, but it came better from you than from me.’

  ‘Do they really hate each other? I suddenly sort of felt it, and it gave me the shivers.’

  Grandad sighed.

  ‘Tell me some other time,’ said Letta. ‘I didn’t mean to stir you up.’

  ‘No. I would like to talk for a little to someone I know I can trust. There are centuries-old animosities between the two families. I think I told you that the national sport of Varina is the blood feud.’

  ‘They’re not going to start massacring each other in the front hall!’

  ‘Unlikely. That time is past. For the moment at least, though if things go badly it could well come back. Mr Orestes’ great-uncle, the brother of the woman who wrote the appalling book, was a lawyer by profession. He wore a top hat and tail coat and went daily to an office, like other lawyers. He was boringly respectable. One evening, and this was only a few years before I was born, he was set upon and knifed to death in the street outside his house. The police arrested a disgruntled client and extracted some kind of confession from him, but very many people, not only members of the Orestes clan, were convinced that the murder was the work of some of the more primitive members of the Jaunis clan.’

  ‘But what’s the point?’

  ‘Hatred needs no point. It needs only an object. Now I think I had better attempt to have a nap, or we will both be in trouble when your momma comes home. Later on will you be good enough to listen to the World Service news for me, and make notes if there is anything that might concern us?’

  Letta set her timer and listened to the radio at ten o’clock, trying to finish her homework at the same time. There was a lot of stuff about Eastern Europe, where all sorts of things seemed to be just going to happen, terrible old Communists giving up power, enormous demonstrations (eighty thousand on the streets of Leipzig, in East Germany – Letta grinned but felt sad when she thought of the handful of Varinians singing in the cold outside the Romanian Embassy), unrest in Bulgaria . . . ah
a! Slovenians in Yugoslavia wanting to be a separate country and the Serbs trying to stop them . . . Letta knew about the Serbs. They were the ones nearest to the Yugoslavian bit of Varina, south of the Danube. Quite a lot of Serbs actually lived in Varina. Serbs were always traitors in the Legends, Grandad had said . . . hell, she’d stopped listening . . . a woman was talking about Ceauşescu, so it must be Romania. Yes. Rule of iron, she was saying. No chance of him giving anything up. Continuing his policy of sweeping peasants off into his new horrible towns . . . there was nothing about Varina itself, but the biggest of the three provinces was the one in Romania. That’s where Potok was, which used to be the capital.

  Oh, I’d love to go to Potok, she thought. One day.

  She sorted her notes out and when she’d finished her homework got an atlas and checked where Slovenia was. Right up in the north. Miles from Varina. Still, good luck to them. If they could, so could everyone else.

  Grandad was up and dressed next afternoon when she took the tea up, but he was on the telephone, trying to explain to somebody who didn’t know much about it – Letta could hear the patience in his voice – that Varina presented special problems because it was in three separate countries, and they’d all have to give up bits of territory which had some of their own people living in them before Varina could be a separate country on its own. She knelt by the fire and started toasting the crumpets.

  ‘Indeed,’ he was saying. ‘Particularly difficult it is. The objections of the various governments we understand. Yet it is our very profound desire. A small but genuine nation is Varina. Our own language we have, not a dialect, our own history, our own culture, our own Church. One of the great poets of Europe, whose name I bear . . . No, at the moment all we ask is recognition we exist. At least as a problem we exist. You understand? This is urgent. The Bucharest regime is attempting the problem to solve by destroying us, by destroying a whole nation. Abominable! You agree? Excellent. No, it is I who am grateful. For your call, thank you.’