Shadow of a Hero Read online

  At first the road climbed steadily along a mountain flank. The surface was good and the curves gentle, so the convoy sped along. Then they turned off up a narrower, steeper road, with huge pot holes unmended since last winter. An endless ladder of hairpins took them grindingly up and up and over a ridge which was a huge spur of the great Carpathian chain. The pass was bleak and barren, between snow-capped peaks. Beyond it the road swooped down towards a wide valley, with a fair-sized river wriggling along the bottom.

  Letta’s ears popped and popped again as they took the downward hairpins. The road levelled and swung round a shoulder, and there, far below them, lay a town, a jumble of red ridged tiles, the domes of small whitewashed churches, larger domes on one big church, a ruined something on the hillside beyond with a mass of tents alongside it. She counted the five bridges and knew it must be Potok. The big church must be the Cathedral of St Joseph, and the ruin was the old monastery of St Valia.

  Everyone was pointing and chattering. Potok vanished and came again several times as the road wound its way down. And then they were there. The town seemed to have no outlying bits. At one moment the coaches were passing scrubby precipitous hillsides, with here and there a tiny stone-walled field or a terraced vineyard, and the next they were in a street of battered old houses, all plastered the same blotchy orange-yellow, with shuttered windows and heavy crooked doors which hadn’t been painted for years, and wide overhanging eaves like hat brims. It was so narrow that in places, if the coach windows had opened, you could have reached out and touched the walls on both sides.

  The street was crowded with pedestrians, who all stopped what they were doing to cheer the coaches as they churned slowly through. Two women in black, with lined weather-beaten old faces, climbed through the open door and came down the aisle, handing out nosegays of rosemary and bay and marjoram tied with ribbon in the national colours. They didn’t want any money. When they got down some of the travellers did so too.

  ‘Let’s walk for a bit,’ said Nigel. ‘Is that OK, Mum? We won’t get lost.’

  Mollie looked at Steff. She usually left family decisions to him.

  ‘Don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘Difficult to get lost in a place this size. If in doubt ask for the University, and when you’re there, look for the British contingent.’

  So Nigel and Letta jumped down and waited while the coach took the stench of its exhaust slowly away, and then followed up the street. It was slow going, as every few yards somebody would stop them and ask where they were from. Letta realized they must be obviously not native Varinians with their Marks & Spencer clothes and their pale northern skins. It had been a terrific summer back home, but their tans still looked washy beside those of the people who lived all the time under these southern skies.

  ‘Where are you from?’ they were asked, time and again, and when they answered, ‘England,’ the next question, almost always, was, ‘Has Restaur Vax come with you?’

  ‘Not with us,’ Letta told them. ‘We came out on a coach, but he’s a bit old for that, so he’s flying to Bucharest. He’s supposed to be here tomorrow.’

  Next, people wanted to know about England, and to try out the English they’d learnt in school, and just be friendly. They didn’t seem to find it odd, either, that Letta could rattle away in Field or that Nigel couldn’t, but there was something about their smiles which gave Letta a feeling that they thought the way she spoke was a bit peculiar. Or perhaps they were simply amused by her eagerness and excitement, which she certainly felt. Being in a country where everybody spoke Field, as the normal thing, was wonderful. She felt like a bird released into the air.

  Nigel was tugging at her sleeve. She looked ahead. The coaches were out of sight.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I don’t want Mum worrying.’

  (Typical Nigel. He was the worrier, not Mollie.)

  So they hurried as best they could, until they found the road blocked almost from side to side by a scrum of people milling round a centre where a man was being hoisted into the air, amid cheers which mingled with hoots and laughter as he was dropped and then hoisted again, to sit on his bearers’ shoulders, waving both arms overhead in triumphant greeting.

  ‘Hey! It’s Uncle Van!’ said Nigel.

  It was, too. He’d had his back to them, but the churn of the crowd turned him until Letta could see her brother’s long, normally moody face, now smiling and excited.

  ‘What’s he think he’s doing?’ said Nigel. ‘This isn’t The Prisoner of Zenda. Bet you he’s told them who his grandad is.’

  Letta found Van interesting, and thought she might have liked him if she’d known him better, but Nigel, naturally enough, had picked up Steff’s attitude. And certainly Van didn’t just look like the star of some old sword-play romance. He seemed to feel like that too, the True Heir come back to his oppressed people. They’d be storming the castle next, while he held twenty men-at-arms at bay on the stairway to the young queen’s bedroom.

  ‘Who do they cheer?’ said a woman crushed against the wall beside her.

  ‘His name’s Van Ozolins,’ said Letta. ‘He’s just come on the coach from Scotland.’

  ‘Scotland?’ said the woman, impressed. ‘Still he is one of us. He has the face of our men.’

  Letta knew what she was talking about. She’d already seen dozens of versions of it on the streets of Potok. Grandad had it, too. He used to joke about it and quote a poem by the other Restaur Vax about Varinian men which started off, ‘Combative, wiry, hound-faced, crazed with honour . . .’ Yes, that was Van all right.

  They broke through at last and jostled on up the street. When Letta asked for the University, the woman she’d chosen insisted on guiding them all the way.

  The University had one lovely old building, stone as yellow as honey, with a pillared front and three red-tiled domes. Bishop Pango had built it, their guide said, but everything else had been pulled down by the Communists and rebuilt with modern blocks. These were like grimy vast shoe-boxes set on end. Despite their size they were depressingly mean and dingy.

  The coaches had unloaded and Mollie was sorting things out. The British contingent had been promised a hundred and ninety beds, and there were fewer than half that for them, but from what the earlier visitors had told her she’d guessed something like this might happen, so now it was a matter of putting the contingency plans into action, seeing that the elderly got first pick, and the families with small children had what they needed and so on. In theory her principal helpers knew what to do, though of course there were some of them who were ditherers or botherers and kept running back with problems for her to sort out, which she did, coolly, never looking irritated or blaming anyone. (A rumour went round the party that evening that one of the local Varinians had watched Mollie in action for a bit and then turned and asked – seriously, according to the story – ‘This is your Mrs Thatcher, then?’ For the rest of the trip everyone, including the local Varinians, called Mollie ‘Maggie’, which as a passionate Liberal Democrat she found trying. That was later, of course.)

  It was obviously going to take hours to get it all sorted out, so Letta decided the best thing she could do to help was to take charge of Donna, who was tired enough by now to be sleepy, but too cross to sleep. She read her Asterix and the Goths for the umpteenth time until she dropped off, and then she put her in the push-chair and found her way round to the official campsite, which was on the other side of the river, spread out along the hillside below the ruined monastery. Letta had arranged to share a tent with a girl from her coach, a couple of years younger than herself, called Janine, who had a Varinian mother and a Welsh father, and a tiny baby brother, who was why Janine was delighted to have Letta to share with. Steff was going to come and put their tent up for them, but he was still helping Mollie, so Letta found herself a narrow patch of shade beneath an old wall and settled down to wait.

  She felt dreamy, dazed, but not sleepy, though she should have been exhausted after the long journey, and the hold-
ups, and the night on the hard ground. Her whole body brimmed with happiness. The wall was part of the ruins, and the sun must just have left it, so that the old stones still breathed out warmth in a caressing, welcoming waft. People moved between the mass of tents, calling and laughing. There were transistors going, and what sounded like live music, twangy ethno-rock, down by the river, which she could sometimes hear muttering over its boulders, though it was shallow and skimpy now. She guessed it must be a real torrent during the snow-melt.

  Over to her right lay the town, all tiles and domes, with a few harsh concrete towers as a reminder of what the Communists had done. From there, too, came a steady muttering, almost too faint to be heard except when some of the thousands of voices that made it burst into cheering or laughter. The smells of the south floated on the hot and golden air, sun-baked dust, dung that dried before it could rot, wild aromatic bushes on the slopes. The whole steep valley purred with her contentment.

  Two boys, fifteenish, came by on the new-worn path below where she sat, walking with that self-conscious swagger boys use when they want to look older than they are. The difference from English boys was that they made a good job of the swagger, despite the fact that they were holding hands. They glanced at Letta, checking her out, then away, either because of Donna or because they thought she was too young for them, and then back with a different look, having registered through some slower mind-channel that she didn’t belong. They stopped.

  ‘You American, huh?’ said the taller one, in English. He had the hound-face, like Van, and obviously thought he was hot stuff. Mentally Letta named him God’s-gift. The other one was shorter, and anxious about most things, a classic henchman. Hench.

  ‘No, from England,’ she said, also in English, waiting for a proper long sentence she could use to spring her Field on them.

  ‘You come in aeroplane, huh?’ said God’s-gift, giving her her chance at once.

  ‘No, we came in a coach. We were supposed to get here yesterday, but the miners held us up with a road-block at Timisoara and then the army kept us there all night.’

  The effect wasn’t quite what she’d wanted.

  ‘Hi! Who taught you to speak like that? You sound like some real old auntie, used to be a teacher or something.’

  ‘That’s how we talk at home. My parents left Varina before I was born.’

  ‘Bet you talk Formal too,’ said Hench. ‘You know, my momma says her poppa tried to make them talk Formal on Sundays.’

  ‘Can’t see the use,’ said God’s-gift. ‘Bloody “leave”.’

  ‘My grandad says they used to call it the pig-verb,’ said Letta.

  ‘Use is, teachers got to have something to teach,’ said Hench. He was brighter than he looked, thought Letta.

  ‘Pig-verb is right,’ said God’s-gift, not apparently noticing that Hench had come up with a genuine thought. ‘Hey! You got any tapes? Genesis? Sting? Bon Jovi?’

  Angel was a Genesis fan, as it happened, and had coaxed Letta into going along when her father had given up an evening’s bowls to take her to a concert in Southampton the summer before. Letta wasn’t a fan of anyone – didn’t in her heart of hearts much care for music – but she felt she’d better take a bit of interest so as not to feel left out, and she’d enjoyed the Genesis concert much more than she’d expected, not the music itself, but the sense of being carried along on a tide of excitement – nothing like as fake as she’d expected – and looking at the weird clothes the fans wore – all that.

  It really paid off now. They squatted on the grass beside her. Even God’s-gift was impressed as she told them about it. Soon he was wanting to know where she was staying, and whether she had to look after Donna the whole time, and then how many cars her family had and how big their swimming-pool was. No swimming-pool! They were astounded. Two cars, and eight separate rooms in the house, and Genesis concerts just down the road, but no swimming-pool. It didn’t make sense. Everybody in the West had a swimming-pool. They knew that because they’d seen it on Dallas and Dynasty – old, old episodes, from what they told her about the plots.

  She put them off about meeting again, saying she was in a group and she didn’t know what they’d be doing, and yes she expected she’d have to look after Donna most of the time (liar – Steff loved doing that). God’s-gift actually seemed disappointed. An English girl who’d been to a live Genesis concert would be something to boast about, even if she wasn’t startlingly beautiful and a bit young and hadn’t got a swimming-pool. Then somebody whistled from down the slope, friends of the pair, and they got up. God’s-gift had one last try.

  ‘Know what you’re doing this evening?’

  ‘We’re all going to a folk concert, I think.’

  ‘That old stuff! Twangle ping, twingle pung, my goat is dead. Can’t stand it. Have fun, though. See you.’

  They machoed away, holding hands again, to join their friends. Letta thanked her stars that Nigel hadn’t been there. He’d have felt challenged to out-macho God’s-gift, and that would have been really embarrassing. And at least it had been a change to talk to someone who didn’t want to know if Restaur Vax was coming.

  LEGEND

  The Hermit of Lapiri

  NOW THE PASHAS of Falje, of Slot, of Aloxha and of Jirin said in their hearts, ‘There is no Pasha in Potok to oversee the taxes, and to leave to the people enough for next year’s seed to be sown, so that next year’s harvest may be taxed in its turn. Soon the Sultan will send a new Pasha to Potok, so let us at once strip from the town all that we can, and carry it to our own Pashaliks. But let us do it under pretext of law.’

  They summoned the aldermen of Potok and said, ‘By your treachery was your Pasha slain, for you warned Restaur Vax of his going to Riqui. Therefore you must pay the blood-price of a Pasha, and that is seventeen thousand kronin.’

  Then the aldermen implored them and said, ‘How shall we find such a sum, when the yearly tax of Potok is but seven hundred kronin?’

  The Pashas said, ‘It is for you to answer your own question. You have treasure, all of you, hidden below your stair. Your wives wear gold pins in their shawls. And take heed to gather the blood-price by St Axun’s Day, for should you fail we will take the blood-price in blood. Every fifth man we will slay with the sword, and your sons we shall take for slaves, and your sisters and daughters for our own uses, and your roof-trees we will burn with fire. See to it.’

  At that the aldermen of Potok despaired, and took counsel. And one said, ‘Let us send to Restaur Vax to come to our rescue, saying that it is he who has brought this vengeance on us by slaying our Pasha.’

  So they agreed, though some thought in their hearts that they would betray Restaur Vax to the Pashas, and so save their town.

  When the message was brought to Restaur Vax he said, ‘We must go to the aid of Potok.’

  His chieftains answered, ‘What are these townsmen to us? They are Greeks and Magyars and Croats.1 They buy for three stija and sell for ten. They have treasure of their own below their stairs. Let them pay their own price.’

  Then Restaur Vax spoke strongly with them, saying, ‘Potok is the heart of Varina, as the mountains are its soul. How can the soul live without the body, and how can the body live without its heart?’

  But they would not hear him.

  Then Restaur Vax said, ‘Your choice is your choice, but I will go. Alone I will go, if need be.’

  Lash the Golden said, ‘Body, heart and soul are all one to me, and mine are sworn to you. I will come also.’

  And the Kas Kalaz, not to be shamed by Lash, said he would go with them, and so said some few others, but with doubting hearts, for they were not enough to fight the Pashas on a level plain.

  But Restaur Vax cheered them and said, ‘What we cannot win with our swords we must win with our wits. Moreover we must bind these merchants to us with ties of blood and of gold, or when the chance comes they will think to betray us. Gather therefore with your best men into the wood above St Valia, and I will come
to you there on the Eve of St Axun.’

  Then he took his horse and rode to Lapiri, where lived a hermit who had been once sub-Prior of St Valia’s, and knew all its secret ways, but now was of great age and blind, and to him he told what was in his heart.

  Then the hermit said, ‘For what they have done to St Valia’s, and what they will do to our sacred land, I will help you as I can. But even to the Turk I will tell no lie, lest I peril my soul.’2

  To that Restaur Vax agreed. He put the hermit on his horse and led him by goat-paths and the paths of the hunter until, on the Eve of St Axun’s, they came to the wood above St Valia. Thence a boy led the hermit down into the town and took him to the aldermen. To them he spoke thus:

  ‘I am the Hermit of Lapiri, who in former days was sub-Prior of St Valia’s. I have heard of your need, and I will go to the Pashas tomorrow and tell them of a secret place where they will find a treasure of seventeen thousand kronin, and that they may take as the blood-price for the Pasha of Potok. But hear me, these Pashas are men of insatiate greed, and they will ask me if there is any other treasure in Potok.’

  ‘To that you must answer that there is none,’ said the aldermen.

  ‘That cannot be while you have treasure, each of you, below your stair. For I will tell no lie, even to the Turk, lest I peril my soul.’

  ‘Then what can we do?’ asked the aldermen.

  ‘You must send it out of Potok to a safe keeper,’ said the hermit, ‘and by the will of God Restaur Vax is even now in the wood above St Valia. Send it to him this very night, and I swear to you that he will return to you, when the Pashas have taken their blood-price, all that is yours.’

  Then they said, ‘This Restaur Vax is a brigand and the friend of brigands. He will steal our gold.’