Peter Dickinson - Shadow of a Hero

She wanted to keep Varina as a kind of frill, a flavour, an old book you don’t read any more. It was cooking kalani and dancing at midnight in St Joseph’s Square. If Potok fell to ruins, if nobody remembered the dances, or knew how to cook kalani and trozhl and dumbris , if nobody dreamed in Field, if no-one could ever be pierced to the heart again by the single word anastrondaitu , Momma would say it was a pity, but that was all. She would say that she and her family had their own lives to live, here, now, in England. That was what really mattered. She would mean it, too, but still she would be lying.

Letta shook her head. I’m not going to tell myself that lie, she thought. Even if something like what happened at Lapiri happens to me, I will never tell myself that lie.

I hope.

LEGEND

The Daughter of Olla

MEN CAME TO Restaur Vax while he was shearing his sheep by the bridge of Avar, and told him that Selim Pasha was besieging Potok with seventeen thousand bazouks . He said nothing until he had lifted the fleece cleanly from the ewe between his knees. Then he laid his shears aside and stood.

To each of the men in turn he said, ‘Go now to such-and-such a chieftain and tell him what you have told me. Bid him come to the Old Stones of Falje on the eve of the next new moon.’

But to the last man of all he said, ‘Go west and south, beyond the furthest border. Ask those whom you meet for the place where the mountains are wildest and the law is least. There you will find Lash the Golden. Give him this half-piece of silver, and say no other word.’

So the men departed. Then Restaur Vax said to his wife, ‘You are my treasure and my joy, but Selim Pasha is besieging Potok with seventeen thousand bazouks , and I alone can hold the chieftains together, to drive him out once more. So give me your blessing and your leave, and when it is done I will return.’

She said, ‘If you must go, you must go. I give you my leave and my blessing.’

He said, ‘Men will seek you here to use you, because I am who I am. Take your daughters and our son 1to the cave where we were betrothed, and you will be safe.’

So they loaded three mules with all that they could carry, food and gear and guns, and Restaur Vax with his son in his arms led his family to the cave below the ridge of Avar, and saw them well-housed, and journeyed on to the Old Stones of Falje.

Now in Potok there were certain Greek merchants who feared for their lives and their goods should the city fall. They said among themselves, ‘Restaur Vax is no help. He is no more than a mountain brigand. Let us open the gates to Selim Pasha and he will protect us.’

So two of them went secretly to Selim in his camp and stood before him and said, ‘We will open the gates to you, if you will protect us and ours when you sack the city.’

But Selim smiled in his beard and shook his head. He took a peach and crushed it in his hand so that the juices ran between his fingers and said to them, ‘I hold Potok in the palm of my hand. My bazouks could take it in a morning, were I to give the order.’

He tossed the spoiled peach aside and said, ‘What use is Potok to me, while Restaur Vax is alive in the mountains? Bring him into my hands, and then I will protect you when the city falls.’

At that the Greeks were dismayed and returned to the city and took council. And one said, ‘A summer ago I travelled in the mountains, and at the bridge of Avar I traded with a woman who nursed a new-born child, her man being away. She spoke to me pleasantly but told me nothing of herself. There was, however, another woman, old and wandering in her wits, who told me that the first woman was the wife of Restaur Vax, and the child was his son, and that during the wars the woman had hidden in a cave far up the mountain until Restaur Vax had come to claim her as his bride. Now, no doubt, the woman is returned to that cave to hide. Let us therefore ask Selim for a safe conduct through his lines and take our Greek servants, whom we trust, and go and find this cave and seize this child, and then we can make Restaur Vax do our bidding for the child’s safety.’

So they agreed. But there was in this house a servant-woman, a Varinian named Olla, who, mistrusting the Greeks and knowing that they had stolen secretly from the town and returned, lay on the boards above, listening through a crack. And she had a small daughter, not eight years old. Olla took thought about how she should warn Restaur Vax, but the Turks ringed the city close about and she could see no way through for herself. So she took a butter barrel, just large enough for her daughter to curl within, and she made a fastening for the lid so that it could be opened from inside, and since she could not herself write, she taught her daughter what to say, and carried the barrel down to the river by night and set it floating on the current, which carried it away.

But the river was in spate with the snow-melt and the barrel jarred heavily against a boulder, so that the child was stunned and the barrel itself broke and the child was washed away down the stream and cast up on a sandbank far from the city.

There she was found by Lash the Golden, who was journeying to join Restaur Vax and fight the Turks once more. He had slept among bushes and woken at sunrise and gone to the river to bathe his face. Finding the child he turned her over and at first thought her drowned, but hoping that perhaps she yet lived, he made a fire and dried her and wrapped her in his coat and rubbed her limbs until she choked and opened her eyes.

Then, not knowing where she was or to whom she spoke, she whispered the lesson which her mother had taught her, saying, ‘I am the daughter of Olla, who is a servant-maid among the Greeks of Potok. My mother has heard her masters planning to seek the cave where the wife of Restaur Vax is in hiding, so that they may take his son and give him to Selim Pasha in exchange for their own safety.’

She closed her eyes and opened them again and said her lesson through, and again a third time, and then she died. At that Lash wept, and carried her to a priest, giving him silver for her burial, and then, going by goat-paths and the paths of the hunter, he hastened all day and all night and came at noon on the second day to the ridge above the Avar, below which lay the cave. There he heard shots, and ran with all speed, and saw men attacking the cave, while one held them at bay from within.

Seeing by their dress that these men were Greeks he lay down and took good aim and shot one man, and a second, and a third, so that the rest turned to flee. Then Lash the Golden drew his sword and fell upon them, cutting them down as they ran. When they were all slain or fled away he returned to the cave.

There he found Restaur’s wife and saluted her as the mother of heroes, for it was she who had held the cave until he came, using two guns, with her daughters loading one while she fired the other. He took them to a place of safety and journeyed on to the Old Stones, where he found Restaur Vax speaking strongly with the chieftains who had gathered there. Now, many were reluctant to take weapons once more and fight the Turk. They said, ‘What is Potok to us? It is spring, and we have our fields to sow and our flocks to drive to the high pastures.’ But Lash stood up before them and told them of the child who had carried the message, and they were shamed. For they said in their hearts, ‘If this child, this daughter of Olla, can die thus for Varina, how should not we, who are grown men and chieftains, do as much?’

1Theodore Vax (1825–1870). Restaur Vax’s poem ‘Prayer for my Son’ (op. cit.) refers to the baby as having been born on the mountain, and baptized in blood, with the smoke of gunpowder for incense.