Shadow of a Hero (7 page)

On Thursday when Letta took the tea up she heard voices before she reached the top of the stairs, so she knocked and waited till Grandad called to her to come in. It wasn’t Mr Jaunis’s day, but he was there and so was Mr Orestes. Without his fur hat you could see that his head really was absolutely shiny bald, which made him look creepier than ever.

‘I’ll just get another cup, so there’s three,’ said
Letta
, assuming that Grandad wouldn’t want her to stay. The visitors obviously thought the same, but Grandad said, ‘We will need two more cups. I cannot expect either Mr Jaunis or Mr Orestes to toast my crumpet to your standards. Did you meet Mr Orestes on Tuesday? No? Hector, this is my granddaughter, Letta.’

Mr Orestes rose and waited while she put the tray down so that he could shake hands with her formally, bowing his head as he did so.

‘Orestes like in the goat-boy book?’ she said. ‘Anya Orestes?’

‘My grandmother,’ he said, in a slightly whining voice.

‘Like us, Hector suffers from the burden of a literary ancestor,’ said Grandad. ‘Now, my darling, if you would be kind enough to bring two more cups and then toast my crumpet, we will continue to settle the future condition of Europe.’

She went and returned, bringing extra hot water as well. She poured the tea, refilled the pot and settled by the fire. Mr Orestes accepted a crumpet which he ate with lashings of butter on it. Letta listened to the discussion and did her best to understand. They were talking about how to follow up on the vigil. In spite of what had happened to Grandad – or rather, because of it – the vigil had made much more of a splash than anyone could have hoped, and people who’d never heard of Varina now knew it was there, and real.

They were talking about some kind of delegation to a minister at the Foreign Office, and who should be on it. The problem for Letta was that she didn’t know any of the names, which made it all a bit meaningless, but after a bit she noticed that as soon
as
either Mr Jaunis or Mr Orestes suggested somebody, the other one would come up with a reason against them. Mr Jaunis was jolly and giggly about this, and Mr Orestes was sour and cold, so it was odd that it was something Mr Jaunis said – the way he said it, more – that suddenly made Letta understand that neither of them was very interested in the delegation for itself but they both were trying to use it to do the other one down. They needed a British MP to lead the delegation and there were two possible choices. Mr Jaunis wanted one, so naturally Mr Orestes wanted the other. Grandad suggested a joint leadership.

Mr Jaunis giggled and said, ‘The difficulty about that, I’m afraid, is that the two gentlemen happen to detest each other.’

With a slight shudder of shock, Letta saw that the two who truly detested each other were Mr Jaunis and Mr Orestes. She didn’t much like either of them herself, but this was different. It was different even from the sort of feud you get between a couple of kids at school, not speaking to each other, letting everyone know how much they despise each other, being generally mean, but all still as a kind of trying-it-out-to-see-if-it-fits exercise, a nasty little game. The way Mr Jaunis and Mr Orestes hated each other was real. It filled the room like a horrible smell. Surely Grandad could smell it too.

Grandad never drank more than one cup of tea, but she took the teapot over to his bed and pretended to offer him a refill. He hadn’t finished his first, and he’d only eaten half his crumpet and let the rest go cold. He was sitting up in bed and leaning back against the piled pillows with his head held straight, glancing at each of the visitors
in
turn as they spoke, making notes on his clipboard. He looked alert enough to anyone who didn’t know him well, pretty spry for eighty-one, in fact, but Letta could see he was forcing himself to stay like that, and really he was feeling almost as bad as when she and Nigel had got him into the taxi.

She turned and waited for a pause in the argument, feeling herself going red.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, too loudly. ‘Grandad’s not feeling well.’

Mr Orestes had just been going to say something. He half turned his head and looked at her like an angry snake. Mr Jaunis gave a surprised giggle.

‘The doctor said we mustn’t let him get tired,’ she stammered. ‘Momma – my mother – she’ll be very upset, if . . . I mean . . . and you want him well too, don’t you?’

‘I’m afraid Letta is right,’ said Grandad’s voice behind her. ‘I apologize for my feebleness, gentlemen, after you have come all this way, but we had better not risk my daughter’s wrath. Since we have reached an impasse over the leadership of the delegation I propose to resolve the matter as follows. I have a list here of the names we have agreed for the Varinian delegates, and I will write to Mr Craigforth and Mr Weller suggesting a joint delegation. I will do a draft in time to post it to each of you tomorrow, so that you can telephone me with suggestions, if any – I trust that will not be necessary – in time for Mr Jaunis to bring me the typed-up letters to sign on Monday. We will give tomorrow a miss, Teddy. I trust that is agreeable to you both, gentlemen?’

It obviously wasn’t, but they had to put up with
it
. Letta thought about Grandad as she took them downstairs. He wasn’t anything official. He’d just been Prime Minister of Varina for a fortnight over forty years ago, and even in that fortnight nobody except the Varinians had considered it to be a real country – no-one else wanted to know about it. But still, when he told Mr Jaunis and Mr Orestes what he’d decided, they knew that was it.

She closed the front door behind them with a sigh of relief, and heard Mr Orestes’ voice, low but venomous, before they reached the garden gate. Mr Jaunis answered with his infuriating giggle. He did it on purpose, she decided.

When she went to collect the tray she found Grandad had eased himself down the pillows and was lying with his eyes closed. But he wasn’t asleep.

‘Thank you, my darling,’ he said. ‘You did very well. I would myself have asked them to go before long, but it came better from you than from me.’

‘Do they really hate each other? I suddenly sort of felt it, and it gave me the shivers.’

Grandad sighed.

‘Tell me some other time,’ said Letta. ‘I didn’t mean to stir you up.’

‘No. I would like to talk for a little to someone I know I can trust. There are centuries-old animosities between the two families. I think I told you that the national sport of Varina is the blood feud.’

‘They’re not going to start massacring each other in the front hall!’

‘Unlikely. That time is past. For the moment at least, though if things go badly it could well come back. Mr Orestes’ great-uncle, the brother of the woman who wrote the appalling book, was a
lawyer
by profession. He wore a top hat and tail coat and went daily to an office, like other lawyers. He was boringly respectable. One evening, and this was only a few years before I was born, he was set upon and knifed to death in the street outside his house. The police arrested a disgruntled client and extracted some kind of confession from him, but very many people, not only members of the Orestes clan, were convinced that the murder was the work of some of the more primitive members of the Jaunis clan.’

‘But what’s the point?’

‘Hatred needs no point. It needs only an object. Now I think I had better attempt to have a nap, or we will both be in trouble when your momma comes home. Later on will you be good enough to listen to the World Service news for me, and make notes if there is anything that might concern us?’

Letta set her timer and listened to the radio at ten o’clock, trying to finish her homework at the same time. There was a lot of stuff about Eastern Europe, where all sorts of things seemed to be just going to happen, terrible old Communists giving up power, enormous demonstrations (eighty thousand on the streets of Leipzig, in East Germany – Letta grinned but felt sad when she thought of the handful of Varinians singing in the cold outside the Romanian Embassy), unrest in Bulgaria . . . aha! Slovenians in Yugoslavia wanting to be a separate country and the Serbs trying to stop them . . . Letta knew about the Serbs. They were the ones nearest to the Yugoslavian bit of Varina, south of the Danube. Quite a lot of Serbs actually lived in Varina. Serbs were always traitors in the Legends, Grandad had said . . . hell, she’d stopped listening . . . a woman was talking about
Ceau
ş
escu, so it must be Romania. Yes. Rule of iron, she was saying. No chance of him giving anything up. Continuing his policy of sweeping peasants off into his new horrible towns . . . there was nothing about Varina itself, but the biggest of the three provinces was the one in Romania. That’s where Potok was, which used to be the capital.

Oh, I’d love to go to Potok, she thought. One day.

She sorted her notes out and when she’d finished her homework got an atlas and checked where Slovenia was. Right up in the north. Miles from Varina. Still, good luck to them. If they could, so could everyone else.

Grandad was up and dressed next afternoon when she took the tea up, but he was on the telephone, trying to explain to somebody who didn’t know much about it – Letta could hear the patience in his voice – that Varina presented special problems because it was in three separate countries, and they’d all have to give up bits of territory which had some of their own people living in them before Varina could be a separate country on its own. She knelt by the fire and started toasting the crumpets.

‘Indeed,’ he was saying. ‘Particularly difficult it is. The objections of the various governments we understand. Yet it is our very profound desire. A small but genuine nation is Varina. Our own language we have, not a dialect, our own history, our own culture, our own Church. One of the great poets of Europe, whose name I bear . . . No, at the moment all we ask is recognition we exist. At least as a problem we exist. You understand? This is urgent. The Bucharest regime is attempting the problem to solve by destroying us, by destroying
a
whole nation. Abominable! You agree? Excellent. No, it is I who am grateful. For your call, thank you.’

He shrugged as he put the telephone down.

‘I feel myself to be a drip attempting to wear away the great stone of ignorance,’ he said. ‘Journalists have such short, inaccurate memories. Because I was thrown down some steps on Tuesday, they think to consult me on Slovene matters on Friday. By Monday they will have forgotten that I and Varina exist.’

‘You got my note? I did the best I could. It sounded quite hopeful about Slovenia, didn’t it?’

‘There was a good report in the
Telegraph
as well, but thank you, my darling. Yes, it is a sliver of hope. The Slovenes are a reasonable people – a rare phenomenon in the Balkans. Tell me some gossip. What has Angel been up to?’

LEGEND

The Kas Kalaz

THE PASHA OF
Potok pursued hotly after Restaur Vax and Lash the Golden, seeking vengeance for the death of his son.

‘Let us cross the mountains,’ said Lash. ‘The Pasha of Falje is at odds with the Pasha of Potok. He will not trouble us.’

‘To cross the mountains our best road runs through Kalaz, and I would welcome the chance to speak with the Kas Kalaz, for we need his aid,’ said Restaur Vax. ‘But is there not a feud between you and Kalaz?’

‘Indeed there is such a feud,’ said Lash, ‘and many lives have been taken. My own grandfather killed the uncle of the present Kas Kalaz, in fair fight, close by the Iron Gates, and threw him into the river.’

‘So you cannot go by Kalaz,’ said Restaur Vax.

‘I will go by goat-paths and the paths of the hunter, and over the Neck of Ram,’ said Lash. ‘And you will go through Kalaz and speak with the Kas, and we will meet in three days’ time at the Old Stones of Falje.’
¹

So they agreed, but what Lash had not said was that beneath the Neck of Ram lived a shepherd who had a fair daughter. Then Restaur Vax rode
over
the Eastern Pass and came to Kalaz, where he made himself known to the Kas, and spoke very strongly with him, saying that the time was ripe to drive the Turk from Varina. The Kas was an old man, and wasted with illness so that he could not rise from his chair, but he looked fiercely at Restaur Vax and said, ‘The word is that you have a bandit as your companion, a man called Lash.’

‘It is so,’ said Restaur Vax.

‘There is blood yet to be paid between us,’ said the Kas. ‘This man’s grandfather trapped my uncle by a trick at the Iron Gates, and slew him and threw his body in the river. I would see the debt paid before I die.’

‘Would you not sooner see the Turk driven from the land?’ said Restaur Vax.

‘Sooner than all the earth,’ said the Kas Kalaz.

‘While brother slays brother and neighbour lies in wait for neighbour it cannot be done,’ said Restaur Vax. ‘The time is ripe, but we must plan with a single mind, endure with a single heart and smite with a single arm. Let the debt be forgotten.’

‘Blood can never be forgotten,’ said the Kas Kalaz. ‘But it can be frozen for a season. Therefore by the bones of St Joseph I swear that the Kas Kalaz will seek no vengeance from Lash or the clan of Lash until the Turk is driven from the land.’

Then he said to his eldest son who stood at his side, ‘You hear this? When you yourself are the Kas Kalaz and Restaur Vax sends word to you to come, you will leave both your harvest and your hunting, you and all the men of Kalaz, and go with him to fight the Turks, and all feuds will be frozen.’

‘By the bones of St Joseph I will do it,’ said the son of the Kas Kalaz.

Well pleased, Restaur Vax rode on his way and
camped
by the Old Stones of Falje. For a day and a night and another morning he waited for Lash the Golden, and when the sun was high in the sky he saw a woman come running down the mountain. She fell at his feet half-dead from weariness, but he lifted her up and she said, ‘Ride swiftly to the shepherd’s house below the Neck of Ram, for the son of the Kas Kalaz is there with his men, and he has seized Lash the Golden and put a rope about his neck and vowed that he will hang him at sunset.’