Between the Woods and the Water (29 page)

Well, as a result of all this, Radu and his family, after two and a half centuries under Rome, are members of the Orthodox Church again: rather bewildered, perhaps.

* * *

Cliffs and bands of rock jutted from the trees and sometimes the woods opened to make way for landslides and tumbled boulders and fans of scree. There was the scent of pine-needles and decay. Old trunks had rotted and fallen and the pale leaves of the saplings which replaced them scattered the underworld with various light and broke it into hundreds of thin sunbeams. The ghost of a track, perhaps only used by wild animals, advanced with hesitation; the matted carpet of leaves, cones, pine-needles, acorns, oak-apples, beech-mast and the split caskets of chestnuts must have been piling up forever. A tall pine had collapsed in a tangle of creepers and I was scrambling on all fours through the foxgloves and bracken underneath when my hand closed on something half-buried in leaves. It was a five-pointed stag's antler: a marvellous object, from the frilled coronet at the base to the tips of sharp tines as hard as ivory. How could something gnarled with these ancient-looking wrinkles have such a swift growth and so brief a life? They prick through a stag's brow in spring like twin thoughts breaking out of the skull, then shoot and ramify with the fluid motion of plants, fossilising as they grow; larger each year, more fiercely spiked, then scabbarded in velvet to be torn to shreds against boles and branches until the buck they have armed is ready to clear the woods of
rivals; only to fall off again at the end of winter, like moulting feathers. This one was about a foot and a half long and perfectly balanced and I set off through the bracken feeling like Herne the Hunter. It was impossible to leave it there, even if I couldn't take it all the way to Constantinople.

Soon I came on four does, each with a fawn grazing or pulling at the branches that hemmed the clearing. I must have been down-wind; they only looked up when I was fairly close. They turned in a flurry, heading for the underbrush and sailing downhill in great arcs until all their white rumps had vanished in turn; and, as they took flight, a russet stag, unseen till then, looked up with a sweep of horn that was spread far wider than the antler in my hand; and while the does were curvetting past, his antlers swung out of profile into full face like a ritual separation of twin candelabra. His wide eyes were severe but unfocused, white flecks scattered the back of his tawny coat, and his hooves were neat and shining. Turning aside, he took one or two sedate and strutting paces, trotted a few more with his head and its scaffolding well back, and leaped down the slope after the does. The load of horn rose and sank with each bound; then he flew headlong through a screen of branches like a horse through a hoop and the boughs closed behind him as he crashed downhill and out of earshot.

I could hardly believe they had all been there a few seconds before. Could my antler have once been his, shed a few years back? Perhaps even now he had not reached full span, although August was beginning: I had seen no tatters of velvet... Anyway, the trove in my hand could just as easily have been centuries old.

Bit by bit, the shoulders of bare rock began to grudge foothold to the taller trees and I was advancing through dwarf fir and a slag-like scree covered with a spectral confusion of thistles. A pale ridge of mineral had sprung up to the right; a much loftier upheaval soared to the left, with another far away beyond it, wrinkled, ashen and shadowless, like an emanation of the noon's glare. I was moving along an empty valley of pale rocks and boulders, cheerlessly plumed here and there with little fir trees, and eventually
these too died away. The warp of the mountains had led me astray. I was not sure that I was where I thought I was, or where I ought to be. It was a bleak place with the pallor of a bone-yard and a wind blowing up made it bleaker still. Damp mist was advancing along the trough, thin wisps at first, followed by denser whorls of vapour clammy to the touch, until it was hard to see more than a few yards. I must have been in the heart of one of those clouds that people gaze at from the plain as they come decoratively to anchor along the cordilleras. When the mist turned into fine rain, I fumbled my way up the flank of the ridge which had stealthily piled up between me and the slope I had been following for two days. I found a cleft in it at last, climbed steeply out of the mist and then down again through boulders and unstable cataracts of scree and plunged through the thistle-belt and the dwarf fir, putting the ascending process into reverse until I was back among the bracken and the sheltering hardwoods and pines. Scrambling about the planetary emptiness above, I had lost my bearings; and when I found the vestige of a sheep-track—unless it had been trodden there by deer—I followed its slight slant, hoping for a turn to the left, but in vain; until, late in the afternoon, I heard dogs barking far away and an occasional bell, and lastly, a clear liquid music that I couldn't place. But when the trees opened there was something familiar about the sloping grass, the shingle roofs at the far end and the grazing sheep. It was Radu's clearing; I had travelled in an enormous circle.

Vexation only lasted a moment. I had thought I would never see that place again.

The musical notes came from Radu's brother Mihai. He was sitting on a green rock with his crook beside him under the moss-covered boughs of an enormous oak and playing a six-holed wooden pipe a yard long. It was a captivating sound, sometimes liquid and clear, sometimes, in the bass notes, reedy and hoarse. Minims and quavers hovered, sinking at the end of each passage to deep semibreves before reascending and moving on. Across the valley, the sun dropped among the lower ranges and clouds broke
the sunset into long beams. They climbed to our ledge, touched the undersides of the leaves and lit up the sheep's wool. The oak-branches, the drifts of clouds and the mossy glooms winding through the trunks were suddenly shot through with spokes of sunset. Birds scattered the air and the topmost branches, and for a few minutes all the tree-trunks flared as crimson as a blood-orange. It might have been the backwoods of Arcadia or Paradise and we advanced over the grass with the antler and the flute and a troop of five dogs like actors in an enigmatic parable or a myth with its context lost.

The others were surprised and welcoming. It was like coming home. Radu was puzzled: why lug that antler about? Last night's thought of a hare had not been forgotten—indeed, my return might have been pre-ordained—for his gun leant against a tree and the yard was afloat with fumes of onion, garlic, paprika and bay leaves.

After leaving sketches of some of them next morning, I set out again, guided for a furlong or two by Mihai, who filled me with half-grasped instructions.

* * *

The scurry and improvisation of the days before starting south from Lázár's had driven serious planning clean out of our minds. The proper thing on leaving the Maros would have been to follow its tributary, the Cerna,
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past Hunyadi's castle once more then to the beautiful Hátzeg valley. Here I could have stayed with the eccentric Gróf K—the one who had ridden a horse with its head in a bag. (His fame was widespread; the shepherds smiled when his name cropped up.) Then I could have climbed through the forest to the great Retezat massif. It was here that István had suggested that we might have hunted chamois. When I reached civilisation
again after these mountain days, I was distressed to learn all I had missed: chamois, perhaps; deep silent valleys; a special rose-red heather smelling of cinnamon and named after Baron Bruckenthal; hundreds of streams; peaks that sailed into the air like pyramids and dropped plumb into the abyss; cascades of mighty blocks scattered in wild disorder; scores of Alpine lakes... It struck me, all the same, that I had hardly been starved of splendours. Could that distant glimpse yesterday have been the summit of the Retezat? Probably not. I didn't know then and I still don't.
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Other wonders lay hidden in that labyrinth of valleys. Deep in the heart of them were the remains of Sarmizegethusa, the old capital of the Dacians and the stronghold of King Decebalus. By the time he had reduced Domitian to paying the Dacians a kind of Dac-geld, Decebalus and his realm had become the most powerful force ever to confront the Empire; he was a great and noble figure, and when Hadrian invaded his mountains, it was almost a contest between equals. It took a bitter and laborious campaign and all the science and siegecraft of Rome to subdue him: skills which Decebalus himself had anyway half-mastered; and in the end, rather than surrender to be led fettered in a triumph, the King fell on his sword in the high Roman fashion. Sarmizegethusa became Ulpia Traiana, the stronghold of the Legio Tredecima Gemina, and the place was cluttered still with carved fragments recalling the Leg. XIII Gem., which sounds like a legion at double strength. Its eagles presided there as long as the province lasted. Stupendous walls and the ruins of an amphitheatre show the importance of the city; broken statues of gods and emperors and the great hewn ashlars of temples scatter the region; fallen shrines speak of Isis and Mithras, and fissured mosaics underfoot spread the mythological floors of old dining rooms.

The most difficult parts of my attempt to keep to the western slopes of this range were avoiding loss of height and resisting the ways the grain of the mountains tried to impose; but upheavals,
bands of rock, dejection-cones and landslides made this hard; it was often a question of zigzagging to the bottom of a ravine and up the other side, or of swerving into a hinterland where I was nearly bound to go astray. I did both; but, looking at the sun and my resurrected watch and the compass (only used, so far, on my last day in Hungary) I managed not to get irretrievably lost.

I saw nobody all day; there were numbers of red squirrels, a few black ones, and innumerable birds; but the only larger creatures were hawks and, usually in pairs, languidly and loftily afloat round the jutting bastions of rock, golden eagles. Sometimes I was looking across wide bowls of tree-tops before plunging into them; at others, striding over grassy saddles or scrambling on those expanses that, from below, looked like bald patches; but most of the time I followed whatever dim woodland tracks I could unravel; breaking off, every so often, to side-step across unstable and irksome cascades of shale: then back under the branches. As usual, on lonely stretches, poetry and songs came to the rescue, sometimes starting echoes. I still had plenty of food; there were dozens of streams to drink from, many of them thick with watercress, and as I flung myself face down beside one like a stag at eve, I thought how glad I was, at that particular moment, not to be standing properly at ease on the parade ground at Sandhurst. Oxford would have been better; but this was best.

The ledge I found for the night was sheltered by trees on three sides and, on the fourth, the tips of the pine trees zoomed into the depths. When the afterglow following a bonfire-sunset had gone and the bed-time pandemonium of birds began to quieten, I rugged up, lit a candle, fished out my book and for a few pages followed the adventures of Theodore Gumbril. The stars were unbelievably dense, to gaze up turned one into a multi-millionaire, and better still, the Perseids were still dropping like fireworks. I had travelled far and I was soon asleep, but when the chill of the small hours woke me, I put on another layer of jersey, swallowed what remained in the flask and found the late-rising moon had extinguished many of the stars, just as Sappho says she does. The last
quarter scattered the woods with vistas and depths and the gleams of lit rock.

Soon after setting off in the morning, I halted on a grassy bluff to tie up a lace when I heard a sound which was half a creak and half a ruffle. Looking over the ledge to a similar jut fifteen yards below, I found myself peering at the hunched shoulders of a very large bird at the point where his tawny feathers met plumage of a paler chestnut hue: they thatched his scalp and the nape of his neck and he was tidying up the feathers on his breast and shoulders with an imperiously curved beak. A short hop shifted the bird farther along its ledge and it was only when, with a creak, he flung out his left wing to its full stretch and began searching his armpit, that I took in his enormous size. He was close enough for every detail to show: the buff plus-four feathers covering three-quarters of his scaly legs, the yellow and black on his talons, the square-ended tail-feathers, the yellow strip at the base of his upper beak. Shifting from his armpit to his flight-feathers, he set about preening and sorting as though the night had tousled them. He folded the wing back without haste, then flung out the other in a movement which seemed to put him off balance for a moment, and continued his grooming with the same deliberation.

Careful not to move an eyelash, I must have watched for a full twenty minutes. When both wings were folded, he sat peering masterfully about, shrugging and hunching his shoulders from time to time, half-spreading a wing then folding it back, and once stretching the jaws of his beak wide in a gesture like a yawn, until at length on a sudden impulse, with a creak and a shudder, he opened both wings to their full tremendous span, rocking for a moment as though his balance were in peril; then, with another two or three hops and a slow springing movement of his plus-foured legs, he was in the air, all his flight-feathers fanning out separately and lifting at the tips as he moved his wings down, then dipping with the following upward sweep. After a few strokes, both wings came to rest and formed a single line, with all his flight feathers curling upwards again as he allowed an invisible air-current to carry him out
and down and away, correcting his balance with hardly perceptible movements as he sailed out over the great gulf. A few moments later, loud but invisible flaps sounded the other side of a buttress and a second great bird followed him almost without a sound. They swayed gently, with a wide space of air between them, like ships in a mild swell. Then as they crossed the hypotenuse of shadow which stretched from the Carpathian skyline to the flanks of the Banat mountains, the morning light caught and burnished their wings and revealed them both in their proper majesty. To look down on this king and queen of birds, floating there in aloof companionship, brought a long moment of exaltation. To think the Kirghiz used golden eagles for hunting! They carried them on horseback, a seemingly impossible feat, then unhooded them over the steppe to soar and spy out antelopes and foxes and wolves and then stoop on their quarry. Hereabouts, Radu had conveyed, they sometimes rivalled wolves in decimating flocks and, I learned later on, in wreaking havoc among the sheep and goats of the Sarakatsan nomads of the Rhodope mountains, and the flocks of Radu's relations, the Koutzovlachs of the Pindus. They circle above the folds, hover, take aim, then fall like javelins and carry lambs piteously bleating into the sky.