Shadow of a Hero (10 page)

Letta sensed others in earshot craning to listen.

‘He’s flying out in two days’ time with his daughter and son-in-law,’ said Mollie. ‘He’ll be there.’

Somebody behind Letta sighed with relief, or content. The coach-captain worked her way back up the aisle, repeating the news. Letta caught Nigel’s eye. He gave his head a little shake and she nodded agreement. They’d already settled that they weren’t going to tell anyone that Restaur Vax was their grandad, unless they were asked. It was lovely that everyone wanted him there so much, but that wasn’t anything to do with them. They were just a couple of young Varinians, no different from any of the others.

They sang most of the way to Dover, and waved their Varinian flags (purple and black and white, courtesy of VIBI) at anyone who was looking
whenever
they came to a halt. The M25 was jammed at the Thames tunnel, which meant an anxious fifty-minute wait, but Mollie’s schedules allowed for that sort of thing and they made it to Dover with time to spare. So did the two trucks and the other ten coaches, though the one from Liverpool only just. Van was supposed to be on the Edinburgh coach, but he didn’t come and say hello so Letta and Nigel went to look for him. They found him in one of the bars with a group of friends. He raised a hand and came over.

‘Hi, Sis,’ he said. ‘Hi, Nigel.’

‘Isn’t this terrific,’ said Letta. ‘I’m sorry Susan’s not coming. Mollie says she changed her mind.’

‘We’ve split up,’ said Van.

‘Oh! I’m sorry.’

‘Forget it. These things happen. Tell the others not to mention it, will you? OK, see you later.’

He turned and went back to his friends.

‘That’s a pity,’ said Mollie when they told her. ‘I really like her.’

‘Typical Van,’ said Steff.

They spent their first night at three big motels near Cologne, and then, because they were going the long way round through Hungary, they did a tremendous dash down the autobahn almost as far as Vienna. (It would have been quicker to go through Yugoslavia, but there was some kind of trouble brewing there, between the Serbs and the Croats, and somebody might have decided they weren’t going to let eleven coach-loads of Varinians through.) Next morning they started at dawn and headed east towards Budapest, and still
on
east, though Varina now lay almost behind them to the south.

That afternoon they reached the Romanian frontier at Bors, and there there was a three-hour hold-up while the committee argued with customs officials, who seemed to think they were bringing their truck-load of stores in order to sell them on the black market. They were really hoping to be bribed, Steff said. At last they let the convoy move on again.

Hungary had been a bit different from the West, but not too obviously. The roads had been worse, and the towns and villages had looked strangely old-fashioned, with fewer cars and a lot more people on bicycles. There’d been horses and mules, and even oxen, working in the fields, or pulling carts, or just plodding along the roads with enormous strange loads on their backs. Romania was the same, only much more so. After Bors they turned south through an enormous level plain, with mountains blue and vague on the horizon to their left. The soil in the fields seemed good, and often the crops were neat and strong, but the people looked poor, sad and exhausted, though they stared and then smiled and waved as the glossy air-conditioned coaches rushed by, full of foreigners singing and waving unknown flags. Letta almost felt that it was tactless of the travellers to be there at all, so happy and excited, and so unbelievably richer and more comfortable, even the poorest of them, than the workers in the fields.

The other enormous change, of course, was the heat. She didn’t feel it in the coach, but she could see it even through the tinted windows, the fierce sunlight radiating off the baked and dusty earth,
or
steaming up from marshes, or making hard-edged shadows under groups of trees where tired cattle lay and twitched. The coaches stopped every two hours so that the passengers could stretch their legs, and when Letta reached the doorway the heat blasted up at her off the road, and going out into the sunlight was like walking through a barrier. Then the coach, when she climbed back inside, felt not just cool but freezing.

‘Those must be the Carpathians,’ said Steff, pointing at the distant mountains. ‘If all goes well we should be in Potok by sunset.’

But all did not go well. Late in the afternoon, a few miles after Timisoara, there was a hold-up. Letta’s coach was the last of the line, so that Mollie could keep an eye on the rest of the convoy, and there was an intercom link to the leading coach. When they’d been waiting a few minutes the driver turned and waved to the coach-captains. They went and listened to the intercom and then Anne, the thin and worried one, came bustling back. Mollie met her half-way down the aisle, discussed something briefly and went forward to the intercom. After another discussion she turned and held up a hand for silence.

‘There’s a road-block,’ she said. ‘They don’t seem to be police or army. They’re calling themselves a miners’ committee. You probably know that the miners supported Ceau
ş
escu, but Hector says these people are more like bandits. The trouble is they’re armed, and they look as if they want to hijack our trucks. But we think if we all get up there and surround them and let them see how many of us there are, they won’t have the nerve to try anything. It’s up to you, of course. Who’s coming?’

The whole coach-load were already on their feet. They crowded towards the doors, Steff carrying Donna on his hip. Ahead of them the other coaches were already emptying and everybody was streaming towards the front of the convoy. By the time Letta reached the trucks, which were between the first and second coaches, the whole Varinian expedition had gathered round, shouting, booing and cat-calling. Both trucks were solid-sided vans, and she could see their tops above the scrum, but not much else.

A ripping clatter broke through the clamour, followed by complete silence. It was a noise Letta had heard time and again on TV, but it didn’t belong in her real world, and it took her a moment to realize that it was a burst of fire from an automatic rifle. A man started to shout angry orders in what she thought must be Romanian. He was answered almost at once by a woman in the crowd starting to sing. Within half a bar they had all taken the anthem up, drowning the man’s voice out. Letta sang automatically but with all her energies, not thinking about words or tune, which they all knew well by now, having sung them again and again on the long road south. Grandad had called the tune funereal, but with several hundred voices singing it by the roadside, and meaning it, they made it into a steady, unstoppable march, the march of a nation.

As they drew breath at the end of the verse the man began shouting again. At once they drowned him out with the anthem. More shots clattered out, but their song didn’t falter or thin. When they reached the end and stopped the man didn’t try shouting, but Letta could hear the mutter of ordinary, angry voices.

‘Stand-off,’ said Steff, craning. ‘They’ve got a gun to somebody’s head. Can’t see who.’

‘They’re not going to . . .’ Letta began, but her voice trailed off in horror at the thought.

‘If they do they won’t get away alive,’ he said. ‘They’ve let us get too close.’

Her heart clenched. He couldn’t mean it. But he did, and it was true. Then he seemed to realize that he shouldn’t have said what he had.

‘You’d better get clear, kid,’ he said in English. ‘You too, Nidge. Take Donna and go back and wait at the coach.’

‘But . . .’ said Letta and Nigel together.

‘Do what you’re told, kids. Right?’

Letta would have liked to argue, but there’s a limit to how far a thirteen-year-old can stand up to an adult, even when he’s only a brother. Nigel would have to do what his father said, anyway, so she’d better, but it didn’t stop her being angry about it.

Nigel took Donna and they wriggled clear and then walked down the line of coaches, craning back over their shoulders as they went. They weren’t the only ones. Other children were coming away too, looking, Letta thought, just the way she felt, shocked and frightened, but hurt too at not being allowed to be part of something very important, something almost that would mark them like a brand or a tattoo, and prove that they were truly Varinians.

When the anthem started again behind them they joined in and marched to its beat, but in the middle of a verse Nigel broke off and-pointed ahead.

‘Someone’s getting impatient,’ he said.

There’d been almost no traffic on the road, but
by
now there was a bit of tail-back behind the coaches, a few battered pick-ups and the odd car. Beside them, on the wrong side of the road, a larger truck was churning forward. As it neared it slowed, and Letta saw that it was full of men, some armed with guns. More miners, she thought with a sinking heart, but then saw that the khaki they were wearing was actually uniform. Soldiers.

The truck halted beside them. A man leaned out of the cab window.

‘English?’ he said cheerfully He must have seen the coach company’s address on the backs of the coaches.

‘Yes,’ said Nigel and Letta together.

‘Why stopping? Accident, eh?’

‘It’s a road-block, miners,’ said Letta.

‘They’re trying to steal our stores,’ said Nigel. ‘Can you sort them out?’

‘OK, OK,’ said the man, grinning and raising a thumb.

The truck roared on. The soldiers in the back waved as if they were going to a party.

‘US Cavalry,’ said Nigel. ‘They’re early. They aren’t supposed to show up till the last reel. What’s the betting they’ll want the stores themselves?’

They moved into the shadow of a coach and waited, drained by heat and tension. Male voices, furious, broke the afternoon calm. The argument ended and the Varinians started to come back down the road, talking and laughing excitedly among themselves and punching triumphant fists into the air. The first to reach Letta were a pair of newly-weds called Milj and Tara. Milj was Varinian but Tara was dark-skinned, from Madagascar.

‘The army showed up and saw them off,’ crowed Milj. ‘Took their guns away and all. Were they pissed off about that!’

‘Can we go on now?’

‘No reason why not.’

But there was. The officer in charge of the soldiers decided that they must stay where they were until he got permission from Timisoara for them to move on. The coaches pulled off onto the verge to let the other traffic through, and then the soldiers searched the entire convoy. They unloaded the trucks and checked everything, and went through the baggage compartments in all the coaches, and then crawled about under the chassis, banging on bits of metal with the handles of their bayonets. When they opened anything, they insisted on the owners being by to see they weren’t stealing. They were delighted with things like video cameras and Walkmans and handed them round among themselves, and wanted to be shown how they worked, but that was more like excited kids with toys, and they always gave them back with smiles and thanks.

‘It can’t be drugs they’re looking for,’ Letta heard a woman say.

‘Something bigger than that,’ said a man. ‘They didn’t bother to open Vicki’s vanity-case.’

‘No, it’s guns,’ said another man.

‘Guns at a culture festival?’ said the woman.

‘We’re going to Potok, honey,’ said the second man, as if that explained everything.

Later, Letta asked Steff about it and he shook his head.

‘Doubt it,’ he said. ‘More likely they were just going through the motions, as a way of keeping
us
here till they got some sense out of Timisoara. My guess is the Romanians never did their sums and really worked out how many of us were coming, not just from the UK, and now they’re getting anxious.’

‘But could it actually be guns?’ said Nigel.

‘I suppose it’s possible. All these countries are pretty jumpy about their minorities, and there are a lot of hotheads around. No doubt some idiots are trying to smuggle weapons in. But I think they’re just being bureaucrats. When a bureaucrat’s bothered, he invariably presses the hold-everything button. Anyway, it looks as if we’re going to have to camp here for the night, so let’s start sorting ourselves out.’

Mollie had a contingency plan for just this kind of crisis, so it all went smoothly enough. A lot of the travellers had emergency rations with them, and there was plenty to spare in the stores truck. An old man came by in the evening, and some of the travellers who could talk Romanian chatted with him, and he shook hands and left, but came back a little later leading two mules laden with immense bundles of firewood, which he sold for several cans of stewed steak. They lit fires, whose smoke drifted up into the dusky air, and ate together, and sang as they’d sung all the way south. The sun had set in scarlet bands and night rose visibly up the eastern sky, the way it never does in England. Steff pointed at the distance.

Their road must have swung a long way back because the hills, nearer now, were over on their right, a hard-edged ragged line, black against the afterglow of day.

‘See that?’ he said. ‘That’s Varina.’

Well, at least I’ve seen it, thought Letta as she fidgeted in her sleeping-bag, trying to find a place where the iron ground was kinder to her hip. Even if we never get there, at least I’ve seen it.

LEGEND

Father Stephan

NEWS WAS BROUGHT
to Falje that the Pasha of Potok, with all his
bazouks
, was slain by Restaur Vax and the Varinians at Riqui. Then the Pasha of Falje, though he had little love for the Pasha of Potok, was both angry and afraid, and sent letters to the other Pashas, at Slot, and Aloxha, and Jirin, saying, ‘Our brother must now be avenged with many lives, or the Varinians will feel strong in their hearts and know they are indeed a people. Then they will rise against us and slay us all. Moreover it is we who must take vengeance, for if we do less the Sultan will send armies from Byzantium, with Viziers and Generals to oversee the vengeance, and we shall ourselves be called to account. Therefore write each of you to the Sultan, as I have done, saying that we have the matter of vengeance well in hand. That done, come with all your
bazouks
to Potok and we will begin the work.’