Peter Dickinson - Shadow of a Hero

Restaur Vax looked her over. She was a handsome woman.

‘It is a fair offer,’ he said. ‘One day I may return. But first I must go to fight the Turks.’

‘If you must go, you must go,’ said the woman.

She went into the house and brought out a sword which she had kept hidden among her roof-beams.

‘This was my husband’s sword,’ she said. ‘It was his father’s, and his father’s before him. But my husband gave me only daughters, and it will be long before either of them bears a son, and longer still before he will wear it. Take it with my blessing, and fight the Turks.’

Restaur Vax tested the sword, bending it across his knee, and it sprang singing back to straightness. So he put it through his belt, beneath his priest’s gown, and thanked the woman and went on his way.

1 Bashi-bazouks were Turkish irregulars, often indistinguishable from brigands. In Varinian bazouk denoted any Turkish soldier of low rank.

2Count Axur was the largely legendary last count of Varina, who is said to have resisted the Turkish conquest until his death in battle.

3Like Orthodox priests, those of the Church of Varina are permitted to marry, but, presumably as an attempt to compromise with Roman Catholic doctrines of celibacy, they may only marry widows.

AUTUMN 1989

THE SECRETARY TURNED out not to be beautiful, but he still could have been a spy, Letta thought. He was a plump, twitchy little man with clever dark eyes, about thirty-something, she guessed. His name was Mr Jaunis (pronounced Jones, roughly, because that is how Varinian works) but he at once told Letta to call him Teddy. She decided not to make up her mind whether she liked him for a bit. It wasn’t that his smiling brightness seemed forced, but it didn’t tell you much. It was like the twinkle on a sheet of water, which might hide anything below the surface, or nothing.

Dutifully, Letta called him Teddy. He came by train from London and walked up the hill from the station. One of his afternoons was Tuesday, when Letta was late home from school because of Choral Soc, so it was only Fridays that the three of them had tea together. The first time he was horrified by crumpets, though they were Sainsbury’s best, and he insisted on reading the list of ingredients on the packet. When he’d decided they wouldn’t kill him, he consented to try a corner of Letta’s but wouldn’t allow her to butter it, though melted butter is at least half the point of having crumpets at all. Letta noticed Grandad watching the by-play over his spectacles with a look of sharp amusement, but when she began to act up herself, coaxing and teasing, he gave a tiny shake of his head, and she stopped.

‘You will have to be more cautious,’ he said after Mr Jaunis had left.

‘I don’t think he realized.’

‘I think perhaps he did. He is a clever and ambitious young man.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought being a secretary was all that ambitious.’

‘It is only two afternoons a week, and for the moment he is not going to let some rival have the chance. The position has its possibilities, apart from the simple one of knowing what I am up to. I am an old man, he may think, and I prefer not to be over-wearied with work. No doubt I would welcome a trusted assistant who could speak for me at times, using my name . . .’

‘You aren’t going to let him!’

‘He has just discovered that. This afternoon he brought me papers to sign – an appeal to various world leaders, a statement to the press, a memorandum to the British Foreign Office and another to the American State Department, and so on. We had settled the texts last Tuesday, but I found both memoranda now contained an extra paragraph, not very significant, but on a delicate point. I told him to take them away and bring them back next Tuesday without it.’

‘You mean he was trying to make you say things you didn’t agree with!’

‘That would have been stupid, and he is far from stupid. I might well have agreed to the addition if he had suggested it while we were settling the text. He knew that, and was just testing my reactions.’

‘Anyway, what is there to disagree about? Don’t we all just want Varina to be a proper country on its own, like it used to be?’

‘That is the romantic view, and since we are a romantic people that is what practically every Varinian would vote for, if it came to a vote. But the historical argument is not strong. Since the mythical days of Count Axur we were a precariously separate country for just over two years, more than a hundred and fifty years ago, from the expulsion of the Pashas until the Treaty of Milan. Then for the next eighty years we were a quasi-autonomous Prince-Bishopric, first under the nominal rule of the Turks and then under the Austrians.’

‘Yes, I know all that, but it doesn’t make any difference. We know what we are and where we belong, don’t we?’

‘We know it only too well. That is part of the difficulty. It makes it harder for us to share the knowledge with our neighbours. Remember, there are areas in all three provinces in which there are more Serbs, or more Romanians, or more Bulgarians, than there are Varinians. And then, my darling, what are we to say to the realists who ask us how a country of three hundred thousand people, landlocked, with barely a town larger than an English village, apart from Potok, how could such a country survive economically in the modern world?’

‘I don’t know. There are lots of tiny countries . . . I mean how big’s Luxemburg? Oh, come off it, Grandad! I know how you’d vote, and so do you!’

‘Yes, of course. Whether it would work or not, we would have to prove to ourselves, and not leave it to the rest of the world to tell us it wouldn’t. But that is not the real argument. The real argument comes in three parts. First, what is the best that we can hope for? Second, what should we demand, as a bargaining position, in order to achieve that best? And third, what promises or threats, what tools or weapons, do we have to bargain with?’

‘Weapons? Do you mean actual weapons?’

‘Some of us do. Some of us want nothing less than everything and would do nothing less than everything to get it.’

‘What do you mean? Hijacking? Murder? Like the IRA?’

‘I will tell you a story. During the war some of my people ambushed a German patrol. Lives were lost on both sides in the gun battle. My people thought that a fair price. But the Germans came to the nearest village and burnt it to the ground and shot all the men and the older boys and took the women and children to camps where many of them died also. My people were outraged, but it merely hardened our resolve. We immediately raided down into territory which the Germans thought they held securely, so as to show them that we were prepared to pay for our freedom not only with our own lives but also with the lives of those we loved.’

‘That’s horrible. But it’s different, isn’t it? I mean it was war.’

‘The IRA will tell you they are fighting a war against an invading power.’

‘But it isn’t true.’

‘It is in their eyes. And with us it is certainly true in the case of the Romanian province. Even by the standards of Eastern Europe the Romanian regime is peculiarly disgusting. They have a policy of trying to turn all its people into robots, all the same as each other and all worshipping their abominable dictator, Ceauşescu. To this end the army is sweeping peasants out of their ancestral villages, and bulldozing the houses and settling the people into dreary identical concrete towns, far from their own fields and farms. The English papers have other things to write about, but Mr Jaunis has reliable information that the process has now reached Varina. There has been fighting between the Romanian army and some of our own people in the Lower Olta valley.’