Shadow of a Hero
Authors: Peter Dickinson
Contents
Legend: Restaur Vax and the Bishop
Legend: The Woman at the Avar Bridge
Legend: The Captain of Artillery
Legend: The Shoulder-blade of St Joseph
Legend: The Death of Lash the Golden
Legend: Restaur Vax and the Bishop: II
About the Book
‘It mustn’t happen,’ whispered Letta.
‘Nothing’s worth that much, nothing . . .’
Letta, born and brought up in London, knows little of Varina – the tiny Balkan state where her parents both grew up. She learns the language and loves the old folk-tales, but she’s British – not Varinian. Or is she?
For as Eastern Europe plunges into chaos following the collapse of communism, Letta’s grandfather – who bears the same name as Varina’s legendary hero – becomes a figurehead for calls of independence for the tiny nation. Filled with enthusiasm, Letta joins a group travelling to Varina for a ‘culture festival’ – only to be met by soldiers with guns. Suddenly the whole bitter, deceitful history is as real as yesterday and Letta realises with horror how fragile they are as a nation – how easily broken by the shadows of the past . . .
LEGEND
Naming the Hero
IN THE DAYS
when the Turks ruled Varina there was a farmer of Talosh who had one son and one daughter. Then a second son was born, and when this child was four months old the farmer and his wife left their elder children in the care of an aunt and set out for Potok, so that the child might be brought good fortune by being given his name by the Bishop Supreme in the Cathedral of St Joseph on the Feast of St Valia.
As they passed over the shoulder of Mount Athur a great storm arose and they were forced to take shelter in a cave, where came also for refuge a young priest, a bandit
1
and a scholar. The storm did not abate, so they saw they would all have to spend the night where they were. The farmer’s wife, being a prudent woman, had packed good stores and was able to cook them a meal, but there was an old feud between the clans of the bandit and the scholar and when they had drunk a little wine these two began to quarrel. The scholar’s tongue was very sharp, and there might well have been murder done if the priest had not threatened both men with an implacable curse if they failed
to
hold their peace. When the time came to sleep he lay down between them, so that neither should harm the other.
Next morning the storm raged still more fiercely, and the farmer and his wife wept at the knowledge that it was now the Feast of St Valia and they would miss the naming-mass, and the child lose his fortune. But the priest said, ‘I will name the boy. My name is Father Pango, and before he is a grown man I myself will be Bishop Supreme. Moreover, this mountain is the heart of Varina, as much as any cathedral. All that is done in Potok is done with the will and consent of the Turks, but here on the mountain we are a free people. So let these two gentlemen stand sponsor, for neither a scholar nor a bandit calls any man master. And the child’s fortune shall be this, that he shall live to see Varina a free nation.’
So it was agreed, and while the mountain shook with the storm they named the child Restaur Vax.
After that, the woman cooked the naming-feast and they ate and drank in fellowship, and fell to wondering what life the child might have, since his elder brother would inherit the father’s farm.
‘He has a good forehead,’ said the scholar. ‘I think he will lead a life of writing and study.’
‘He has sturdy arms,’ said the bandit. ‘He will lead a life of valour and of battle.’
‘I see wisdom in his eyes,’ said the priest. ‘I think he will serve his people and his God.’
So to settle the matter the scholar took his seal-ring and the bandit took a silver buckle from his coat and the priest took an amber bead from his rosary and they tied them over the blanket
where
the child lay, to see which he should choose. But when the child saw them glinting in the firelight he laughed with pleasure, and with one sure movement put up his hands and grasped all three.
1
In both Formal and Field Varinian the word ‘bandit’ has a range of meanings, from armed highway robber to patriotic rebel. Since one man might well be both robber and rebel, this reflects the historical facts.
SUMMER 1989
WHEN LETTA WAS
born she was much the youngest in the family. Her two brothers were already grown up, and she had a nephew who was three months older than she was. At least now she had a niece, Donna, who was only two-and-a-half.
Letta’s brothers had been born far away in Varina, but she was born in England, in the Royal Hampshire County Hospital at the top of the hill in Romsey Road, Winchester. She knew it well, because Momma drove past it every Saturday morning on her way to Sainsbury’s, so when she was small she used to imagine that Varina was another place like the Royal, a huge, muddled brick building with old parts and new parts, a place for babies to get born into and sometimes go back to be measured and tested and be given horrible injections and lied to about how brave they were, but mostly to wait, and wait, and wait.
Even when she was older and understood that Varina was a whole piece of country about the size of Hampshire (though to confuse things it was also pieces of three other countries), parts of the hospital picture still popped up in her picture of it. She knew there were real mountains in Varina, with snow on them half the year round, and blazing hot summers, and brown-faced women in black dresses driving donkeys with huge baskets of maize on either side, and things like that, very
very
foreign, but then the blank spaces would fill up with doctors in white coats, and nurses with syringes, and waiting rooms where you sat for hours, and the ordinary people had worried, unhappy looks on their faces, and nobody told you what was happening.
One morning, later still – she must have been twelve – she told her grandfather about this, because she thought it might amuse him, and also waste a little of the Formal Varinian lesson he gave her on Sundays, after breakfast. He put the tips of his fingers together. Two of them were missing on his left hand, but you could almost see their ghosts where they pressed against their right-hand opposites. He looked at her over his fingertips and wrinkled up his forehead.
‘You saw more truly than you know,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Varina is like that these days. Ah well, let us get on. Where were we? Optative conditionals, I think.’
There were two Varinian languages, Field and Formal. Letta had talked Field for as long as she’d talked English. She’d never had to think about it. That was what it was for, talking, and writing letters and so on. Letta was talking Field with Grandad now. Formal was for poems, and important speeches, and serious books. It had words in it which nobody ever said except at times like funerals, and weird grammar, too. Who needs the Negative Passive Conditional Optative, for heaven’s sake?
Grandad seemed to hear the question in her sigh.
‘How I used to hate these,’ he said. ‘My desk was by the window, and I could see the hillside above my father’s farm. We were beaten for every
mistake
. I had many beatings that year. You are a far better scholar than ever I was.’
‘I mean, what are they for?’ said Letta. ‘If ever I get to Varina I’m not going to go to the supermarket and – hang on while I work it out – when I get to the check-out with all this stuff in my basket and then I find I’ve left my purse at home, I’m not going to say “Would that my purse had not been left behind!” Am I?’
‘You would not find a supermarket in Varina, and if there were one you would find almost nothing on the shelves to fill your basket.’
‘Really? But . . . Anyway, just suppose . . .’
‘First you must express the wish for me in Formal.’
‘Oh, hell.
Fayaletu bijon
?’
‘
Fayo
is a weak irregular deponent, remember. And you must modify the noun.’
‘Hell and hell! Let’s see . . .
Gefayaleto
. . . no,
Gefayalento bijoñ
?’
‘Well done. You had bad luck choosing
Fayo
. We used to call it the pig-verb. Now, suppose you found this supermarket and suppose you were able to fill your basket and suppose there were any chance of your having the money to pay for what you had bought, and suppose you then said to the check-out clerk – if such a creature were conceivable in Varina –
Gefayalento bijoñ
, why, she would certainly burst out laughing.’
‘What’s the point, then?’
‘The point is not to bury a great treasure beyond human reach. For instance, my great-grandfather, your great-great-great-grandfather, when he was in exile in Rome, wrote a poem retelling one of our stories about a feud between two families over a piece of mountain pasture. At the end of it a father
finds
the bodies of his three sons, killed in an ambush. He stands on the mountain track and thinks about the disputed field. He sees it in his mind, after the snow melts, the swathes of bright mountain flowers with the sweet new grass springing between. The last line of the poem is a single word.
Anastrondaitu
. Can you tell me what that means?’
‘Is it
strondu
with the twiddly bits?’
‘Yes.’
‘“If only it had not been remembered”, then?’
‘Yes, and no. Yes, because that is what it literally means. No, because as a single word, complex but exact, coming after the simple words describing the pasture, it pierces right to the heart with its loss and grief. My darling, I would never force you to learn Formal. It is no use unless you genuinely want to.’
‘But I do!’
This was old stuff. The family had argued it through and through. Momma had been against the idea, because she said it was a waste of time when Letta should be doing English schoolwork, and Letta – partly to please Grandad, partly because she thought it might be interesting, but mainly to get her own way with Momma about something – had insisted she did want to learn Formal, and Poppa, who usually kept out of arguments between his wife and his father-in-law, had this time taken Letta’s side. It would be difficult for her to back out now. Besides, whatever he said, Grandad would have been desperately hurt. Again, he seemed to read her thought.