Shadow of a Hero (5 page)

‘Why have they done this thing?’ said Restaur Vax.

‘The son of the Pasha was hunting and saw your sister and would have taken her, but your father smote him with his staff and drove him away.’

Restaur Vax stood silent. Then he said, ‘I will not ask you to give me bread, lest the Turks should do the same to you.’

The woman put her hand into her basket and brought out a fresh-baked loaf and broke it in two and gave him half.

‘I and your grandmother drew water at the same well,’ she said. ‘What are the Turks to me?’

Then Restaur Vax climbed the hill and saw the ruin of his father’s farm and wept.
¹
When he had wept an hour he paced distances this way and that, and then loosed the earth with his sword and
uncovered
a great stone, but he could not move it with his hands. As he was levering at the stone with a hoe-handle which the Turks had broken, a stranger came down the hill, a man of the old blood
²
with yellow hair and beard. He stood two hands’-breadths taller than ordinary men. Though all but
bazouks
were forbidden to bear weapons, he carried a musket at his back and two fine pistols in his belt. He saw Restaur Vax levering at the stone.

‘What is it you do?’ he said.

‘That is my business,’ said Restaur Vax.

‘Well, I will help you,’ said the man, and with his bare hands he lifted the stone aside as if it had been thin timber. Below it in a pit lay a clay pot.

‘So you dug for treasure,’ said the stranger. ‘Well, since we have found it together, we will now share it.’

‘It is my inheritance,’ said Restaur Vax.

‘What need has a priest of an inheritance?’ said the stranger.

‘Great need,’ said Restaur Vax, ‘if I am to fight the Turks.’

‘First you will have to fight me for my share of the treasure,’ said the stranger.

‘Not so,’ said Restaur Vax. ‘For you are going
to
come with me and fight the Turks. What use is it to me to break your bones?’

The stranger laughed and said, ‘You are a better priest than most I have met. Very well, we will not fight each other, but we will have a contest. If I am to trust you as a comrade against the Turks, then you must show me you can use a gun. We will shoot in turn, once with each of my pistols and once with my musket. If I win, I shall take my half of the treasure and go, and if you win I shall come with you to fight the Turks.’

Restaur Vax saw the man’s thought. How should a priest shoot better than a bandit? But his father had kept a gun in among his rafters, and had taught him its use, so he agreed to the contest.

The first target was two peaches set upon a rock. With his shot the stranger knocked the peach off the rock, but with his, Restaur Vax shot the stone out of the peach, leaving the fruit where it was.

‘That was a lucky shot,’ said the stranger.

They reloaded and exchanged pistols.

The second target was two pigeons that chanced to fly past. With his shot the stranger knocked three tail-feathers away, but the bird flew on. With his, Restaur Vax shot the bird through the head, and it dropped like a stone.

‘That was a lucky shot,’ said the stranger.

Now, as they were choosing a target for the musket, the son of the Pasha of Potok came along the road with some of his household on the way to their hunting-ground. Hearing shots where by their law none should carry weapons, they turned aside and saw two Varinians, one of them loading a musket. The Pasha’s son sent five
bazouks
to arrest them, but the stranger raised
his
musket and shot the leading
bazouk
in the shoulder and he fell down, and the others took cover and fired back, and Restaur Vax and the stranger sheltered behind a broken wall while the stranger reloaded.

Now the Pasha of Potok’s son rode up to find the cause of the delay, and Restaur Vax saw him and knew him. He took the musket from the stranger, saying, ‘Now it is my turn.’

When he stood up the Turks all fired at him but he did not flinch. He took steady aim and shot the Pasha of Potok’s son through the heart, so that he dropped from his horse, dead. And all the Turks ran away, rather than face such shooting.

‘That was more than a lucky shot,’ said the stranger. ‘You have won our contest, and I will fight the Turks at your side. There is no help for it, since we have killed the Pasha of Potok’s son, and now there will be a price of many gold pieces on our heads. My name is Lash.
³
Some call me the Golden, for I am of the old blood.’

Now he was a famous bandit, who had killed many men.

‘My name is Restaur Vax,’ said Restaur Vax.

‘You may keep my musket,’ said Lash the Golden, ‘for you have won it fairly, and you cannot fight the Turks without a gun.’

‘A gift for a gift,’ said Restaur Vax, and gave
him
the two rings which the Bishop had given for the purchase of a gun. One was of silver, set with a ruby, and one was of pure gold.

So they vowed everlasting brotherhood, and gathered up Restaur Vax’s inheritance, and left.

¹
This incident is described by Vax himself in
Homecoming
(
Collected Works of Restaur Vax
, Rome 1868).

²
It is popularly believed that Varina derives its name from the Varingian Guard, the famous regiment of Norsemen who served the Emperors in Byzantium. The occasional appearance of blond hair among the normally dark Varinians is regarded as evidence of this. A colony of veterans is supposed to have been established on the Danube some time around the ninth century
AD
, though there is no documentary or archaeological evidence of this being so.

³
Alexo Lash (1785?–1826), Chief Lieutenant to Restaur Vax in the struggle for independence. A flamboyant figure, to whom legends concerning earlier folk-heroes naturally attached themselves. Throughout the whole period of Turkish domination there were always both groups and individuals who refused to accept it, and fought and raided from inaccessible refuges among the mountains.

WINTER 1989

‘HI, AUNTIE,’ SAID
Nigel.

‘Good morning, Nephew,’ said Letta. ‘I trust you are behaving yourself and getting good marks for your schoolwork.’

It was their standard greeting. A car had come for Grandad and she’d driven up with him, but she’d got the driver to stop at the top of the road and walked down by herself, so as not to be seen arriving with the great man. It was a bright November morning. The road was a wide avenue of plane trees, with a big park and some sort of palace on the left and huge solemn houses on the right. Most of the houses seemed to be embassies or something now, with flags and coats of arms over the porches. Some of them had a policeman on guard. She found the Romanian Embassy half-way down the hill with about thirty people standing around while Grandad shook hands with them. There were barriers on the pavement to keep the small crowd in order. Nigel had seen her coming and had walked a little way up to meet her.

‘What’s up?’ she said.

‘Mum’s taken over, of course.’

‘Already?’

‘She called the man you said, and the man knew our name and asked if she’d got anything to do with Grandad and she said yes. And she told him
she
knew about protests and he was keen to have her along. Dad says it’s because she isn’t bothered by policemen, and anyone who’s had to live in Varina can’t help being.’

‘At least the cocoa will be hot. Where is she?’

‘Over there, by the gate.’

Letta turned and saw her sister-in-law, with Mr Jaunis and another man, arguing about something with the policeman who guarded the Embassy. Mollie was a bit older than Steff. She was a square, cheerful woman who loved taking on problems, stray dogs, charity appeals, protests about pedestrian crossings, Nigel’s school friends when they had troubles they didn’t want to talk to their parents about. She was easy to like, but your first thought about having her to help you was, ‘Um?’ because she gave an impression of having just too much energy, like an Old English sheep-dog pup which is full of goodwill but liable to knock tables over and trample the flower beds. In fact she was terrifically organized, and she always took trouble to know her stuff. She’d once done an interview on local radio with some kind of junior government minister about a school closure, and he’d tried to get away with waffling at her, and she’d wiped the floor with him and left him without a waffle to his name. Nigel had sent Letta a tape with a note saying, ‘Boadicea rides again.’

Letta had been pretty certain Mollie wouldn’t mind coming to the vigil for a bit, though she was English, and the family talked English at home. (Nigel could only just about get along in Field.) Steff wasn’t like Momma. He thought and talked about Varina, though he’d left there before he was six. Anyway, Mollie, being Mollie, would have
known
all about Ceau
ş
escu anyway and how disgusting he was and what he was up to. Still, Letta hadn’t expected her to be quite so in the thick of things yet.

It was interesting to watch her in action. Letta had mainly heard about her through Nigel, who of course regarded her as rather a joke, which is one of the important things good parents are for, Letta thought. (The chief problem with Poppa was that he wasn’t there enough for jokes about him to build up properly.) Mollie, she saw, wasn’t all Boadicea. She couldn’t actually hear what the people at the gate were saying – the policeman, Mollie, Mr Jaunis and a slightly creepy-looking skinny bald man in a fur hat – but she could see from their attitude that all three men were a bit unsure of themselves and Mollie wasn’t, and they found that soothing. She was using a portable telephone which the skinny man had handed her. She finished the call and came over just as Grandad reached the end of the line where Letta and Nigel had joined on.

‘We’re waiting for the bloody press, as usual,’ she said. ‘Sorry about this, Grandad. You’re early and they’re late. Are you warm enough? I’ve got some cocoa in a flask. I suppose they wouldn’t let the car wait.’

‘My Marks and Spencer thermal underwear I am wearing,’ said Grandad, in English. Mollie could hardly speak Field at all.

‘Good for you,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think we look a miserable bunch? Isn’t there something we can sing? A national anthem or something?’

‘The words nobody will know. Funereal also the tune.’

‘Well then, a folk-song. Steff’s always whistling
bits
of folk-song. I bet
you
know some folk-songs.’

She had turned as she spoke and said this to a couple of what looked like students next along the line. They’d been holding hands and staring with adoring expressions at Grandad. The young man began to stammer.

‘What about “The Two Shepherds”?’ said the girl. ‘Everyone knows that.’

‘Except me,’ said Mollie. ‘What about it, Grandad?’

‘Good. But Mr Jaunis and Mr Orestes you will consult first?’

‘Yes, of course.’

She darted across. Letta watched the by-play. Mr Jaunis pursed his lips, but the skinny man, Mr Orestes presumably, creased his face into a surprisingly gleeful smile and did a couple of small jig-steps. Everybody cheered up. They divided without being organized into two groups on either side of the gateway. Mr Orestes stood in the middle to conduct.

‘The Two Shepherds’ was a sort of nursery rhyme with silly words, two young men calling to each other across a valley, boasting about how they’ve got the best sheep, the best dog, the best crook, the prettiest girl, and so on. It had a cheerful tune, but the main point was the chorus, which was pure nonsense, the Varinian version of ‘With a folderolderolio’ and you sort-of-yodelled it. Everyone enjoyed themselves. Their voices echoed off the stuccoed walls of the Embassy and up through the branches of the planes into the bright winter sky. The yodelling sounded particularly good. To Letta’s surprise they came to a verse she didn’t know. Then another. Listening carefully, she realized why.

‘What was that about?’ said Nigel, as the other group took up the tune.

‘It’s not the sort of thing an aunt should go telling her innocent little nephew.’

‘Oh, come off it!’

‘Well, he was saying . . . Hold it, I’ll tell you next time.’

It was their turn again, and yet another verse she didn’t know. These words were even more surprising – though there were some she’d never heard before. The woman behind her shoulder had a penetrating clear soprano and sang with great gusto, but when Letta glanced up and caught her eye she stopped short.

‘You understand?’ she whispered in English.

‘Most of it,’ said Letta cheerfully. ‘I can guess the rest. It makes much more sense like this, doesn’t it?’

The woman was not amused, and kept her mouth firmly shut during the next verse, so Letta missed most of it, and then, while they were doing the yodel, which seemed to get longer and twiddlier with each verse, two photographers showed up. The singing stopped, but the photographers wanted them to start again because a singing protest was a bit of a change. Letta heard Mr Orestes telling them that ‘The Two Shepherds’ was a patriotic anthem. A few of the women were wearing national costume – rather bogus-looking, Letta thought, with a big bead shawl and a wide-brimmed hat down on one side – so the photographers made them stand in front and sing, or pretend to in the case of the one nearest Letta. Like Mollie, she was English and didn’t know the words.

Next, Grandad was due to deliver his protest.
The
photographers wanted him to take the Englishwoman in national dress up the steps with him, because she was prettier than the real Varinians, but he put his foot down. He refused to have any of them.

‘Not a charade, this is,’ he said loudly. ‘A protest we deliver about those serious and tragic events that in our country are taking place. A deliberate effort by the Romanian regime is being made to destroy our country, our culture, our language, our sense who we are. Those who resist they torture and kill. Let this be truly understood.’