‘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.’
‘How came the son of the Kas Kalaz there?’ said Restaur Vax. ‘I feasted with him in Kalaz town but two nights past.’
‘Lash visited me,’ said the woman, ‘but my father learnt of his coming and went secretly over the mountains to the son of the Kas Kalaz and told him where his enemy lay. They came at dawn, while Lash still slept, but I was milking the goats and hid, and heard what was said. Then I ran to find you, for Lash had told me where he was to meet you. Now go, and go swiftly.’
‘You must come with me, for I do not know the path,’ said Restaur Vax.
‘I am over-weary,’ said the woman. ‘Who among men could have run as I have run this morning?’
Then Restaur Vax put her on his horse and they went by goat-paths and the paths of the hunter over the mountain. Where the way was steep he led the horse by the bridle, and where it was level he ran with his hand in the stirrup. Eleven kolons2 he ran between her coming and the sunset, and the sun was low in the sky when they crossed the Neck of Ram and came down to the shepherd’s house. There they found Lash the Golden with the rope about his neck, and the son of the Kas Kalaz making ready to hang him.
‘Do not do this,’ said Restaur Vax. ‘You have sworn by the bones of St Joseph that the feud is frozen.’
‘Not so,’ said the son of the Kas Kalaz. ‘My oath is still free. It was the Kas Kalaz who swore, and I in my turn swore for the time when my father is dead and I am the Kas Kalaz.’
Restaur Vax spoke strongly with him, trying to persuade him, but he would not hear, for the feud was old and very bitter, with many deaths. Then, as the rim of the sun touched the Neck of Ram, a man came running up the mountain and fell at the feet of the son of the Kas Kalaz and wept, and then stood and embraced him and called him by his father’s name. By this he knew that his father had died, and he was now the Kas Kalaz, and the oath he had sworn was binding.
So he gave orders, and the rope was taken from the neck of Lash the Golden and the bonds that bound him were loosed, and the Kas Kalaz embraced him and said, ‘The blood between us is frozen, and we are brothers, until we have driven the Turk from Varina.’
But Restaur Vax took Lash aside and said, ‘Speak with honour of this woman all your days, my friend. I have travelled by the path on which she ran to save you, and by St Joseph I myself could not have done it.’
Then Lash was ashamed.
1 The Old Stones of Falje. A bronze age trilith, unique in the Balkans in its design.
2 The kolon is not a precise measure. Any considerable distance is traditionally described as seven, eleven or seventeen kolons.
WINTER 1989/1990
CHRISTMAS FELT STRANGE that year. Usually the holidays began with Letta and Biddie and Angel mooching around Winchester together on the pretence of helping each other buy presents. In fact Angel was far too impatient not to have bought all hers weeks before, so all she could do was enjoy a good wail about the ghastly mistakes she’d made; while Biddie knew exactly what she wanted and where to find it and could get the whole lot in half a morning, so they normally spent most of their time helping Letta, looking in shop windows, and rotting their teeth with soft drinks.
That year there was none of that. Biddie’s parents had bought a cottage in Devon and whisked her off there, while Angel’s dad, who’d lost his job in the summer when his firm had folded, took the family up north because he’d had an offer up there and wanted them to see what they felt about moving. Normally Letta would have missed them badly. Being almost an only child, they counted as sisters to her, Biddie particularly. She and Biddie had been born within a few hours of each other, in the same ward of the Royal but on different days, Letta late on the 28th of August and Biddie early on the 29th, and though they didn’t actually meet again until junior school, when they were seven, they had immediately struck up a friendship; and then, when they had found out about the birthdays and being born in the same ward, they had felt Oh, yes, of course, so that now it was as if they had known each other all their lives.
But that Christmas she didn’t have time to miss Biddie, even. All she wanted to do was stay at home with Grandad, listening to the news coming in about the uprising in Romania and watching the television reports, the swirling crowds in the streets of Bucharest, the snipers and tear gas, the lurch of the picture as the cameraman ducked for cover, and the exhausted faces of ordinary people tense with excitement or weeping with joy while they stammered in smattered English into the microphones. Poppa, who was in England for once, would get home and shout before he was through the door, ‘What’s happening? Anything new?’ and Letta would gabble out the news. Momma, astonishingly, started coming home before half-past six, though usually before Christmas she was working till all hours to get her desk cleared, and she didn’t stop to shop and sent out for pizzas instead, though every now and then she would laugh, and shake her head as if she was shaking away tears and say, ‘It’s nothing to do with us any longer, you know.’
Neither telephone stopped ringing, with old Varinian friends, unheard of for years, wanting to swap excitements, and almost everyone in England, it sometimes seemed, reporters and politicians and historians and mysterious people who seemed to have no connection with Varina at all, anxious to know what Grandad thought.
The rest of the family arrived on Christmas Eve, Mollie and Steff and Nigel and little Donna from St Albans, and Letta’s other brother, Van, and his Scottish girl-friend Susan from Glasgow, where they both worked in TV studios. The house throbbed with excitement and tension and the frustration of being so far away. There was so much electricity in the air, Steff said, that if they could have found a way of plugging the cooker into it they could have cooked their Christmas dinner for nothing.