The Brothers Lionheart

by Astrid Lindgren

  Tears came into my eyes; I had seen pigeons like that only at Sofia’s and then once on my windowsill long ago, in another world.

  Then I did an unheard-of-thing. I jumped down from Fyalar and in two leaps; I was with the old man. I threw myself into his arms and with my arms around his neck, I whispered in my despair:

  “Help me! Save me! Say that you are my grandfather!”

  I was frightened and sure that he would push me away when he saw Veder and Kader in their black helmets behind me. Why should he lie for my sake and perhaps end up in Katla Cavern because of it?

  But he didn’t push me away. He held me tight and I felt his good, kind, arms around me like a protection against all evil.

  “Little lad,” he said, so loudly that Veder and Kader could hear him. “Where have you been all this time? And what have you done, unhappy child, to return home with soldiers?”

  My poor grandfather, what a scolding he got from Veder and Kader! They scolded and scolded and said that if he didn’t keep his grandchildren in better order, but let them roam about in Nangiyala’s mountains, then soon he would have no grandchildren, and he would never forget it. But they would let it go for this time, they said at last, and then they rose away. Their helmets could soon be seen as nothing but small black dots on the hillside below us.

  Then I began to cry. I was still in my grandfather’s arms and I just cried and cried, for the night had been so long and hard and now at last it was over. And my grandfather, he let me, just rocking me a little, and I wished, oh, how I wished he could be my real grandfather. I tried to tell him that although I was crying.

  “Well, I can probably be your grandfather,” he said. “But otherwise my name is Mathias. What’s yours?”

  “Karl Lio—” I began. But then I stopped. How could I be so foolish as to say that name here in Wild Rose Valley.

  “Grandfather dear, my name is a secret,” I said. “Call me Rusky.”

  “Oh, Rusky is it?” said Mathias, laughing a little. “Go on into the kitchen, Rusky, and wait for me there,” he went on. “I’ll just put your horse in the stable.”

  I went in, into a poor little kitchen with nothing but a table and a wooden sofa and a few chair and a hearth. There was also a big sideboard along one wall.

  Mathias soon came back, and then I said:

  “We’ve got a big sideboard like that in our kitchen, too, at home in Cher—”

  Then I stopped.

  “At home in Cherry Valley,” said Mathias, and I looked anxiously at him—once again I had said what mustn’t be said.

  But Mathias said nothing else. He went over to the window and looked out, standing there for a long time, looking about as if he wanted to be sure that there was no one around. Then he turned to me and said in a low voice:

  “Though there’s something special about that sideboard. Wait a minute, and you’ll see.”

  He put his shoulder against the sideboard and pushed it aside. Behind it was a shutter in the wall. He opened it and inside there was a room, a very small room. Someone was lying asleep on the floor.

  It was Jonathan.

  chapter 9

  I can remember a few times when I have been so happy that I have hardly known what to do with myself; once, when I was small and for Christmas Jonathan gave me a toboggan that he had been saving up for a long time. Then that time when I first came to Nangiyala and found Jonathan down by the stream, and the whole of that amazing evening at Knights Farm when I was so happy I could hardly contain myself. But nothing, nothing could compare with finding Jonathan on the floor at Mathias’s place; think, that one can be so happy! It was as if I were laughing aloud in my very soul.

  I didn’t touch Jonathan. I didn’t wake him. I didn’t cry out with joy or go wild. I just lay down beside him quietly and fell asleep.

  How long did I sleep? I don’t know. All day, I think. But when I woke up—yes, when I woke up, Jonathan was sitting on the floor beside me. He was just sitting there smiling; no one looks as kind as Jonathan when he smiles. I had thought that perhaps he wouldn’t be all that pleased that I had come, that he had perhaps already forgotten he had called for help. But now I could see that he was just as pleased as I was. So I had to smile, I too, and we sat there just looking at each other, saying nothing for a while.

  “You called for help,” I said at last.

  Then Jonathan stopped smiling.

  “Why did you call?” I asked.

  It was clearly something he could not think about without being upset. His reply came so quietly it was as if he could hardly bear to answer me.

  “I saw Katla,” he said. “I saw what Katla did.”

  I didn’t want to torment him with questions about Katla, and anyhow I had so much to tell him, first and foremost about Jossi.

  Jonathan didn’t really want to believe it. His face turned white and he almost wept.

  “Jossi, no, no, not Jossi,” he said, tears coming into his eyes.

  But then he rushed up.

  “Sofia must be told at once.”

  “How can we do that?” I said.

  “One of her pigeons is here,” he said. “Bianca. She can fly back this evening.”

  Yes, Sofia’s pigeon, I thought so! I told him that it was because of that pigeon that I was there with him and not in Katla Cavern.

  “It was a miracle,” I said, “that among all the houses in Wild Rose Valley I should come straight to the one you were in. But if Bianca hadn’t been outside, I would have ridden past.

  “Bianca, Bianca, thank you for sitting there,” said Jonathan. But now he had no time to listen to me any more; haste was important now. He scratched on the shutter with his fingernails, rather like a little mouse scratching, and it wasn’t long before the shutter opened and Mathias peered in.

  “And little Rusky, he just goes on and on sleeping...” Mathias began, but Jonathan wouldn’t let him continue.

  “Please get Bianca,” he said. “She must leave as soon as dusk begins to fall.”

  He explained why, telling Mathias about Jossi. Mathias shook his head in that way old people do when they are sad.

  “Jossi! I knew it must be someone from Cherry Valley,” he said. “And that’s why Orvar is in Katla Cavern now. My God, the people there are in this world.”

  Then he vanished to fetch Bianca, closing the shutter on us.

  It was a good hiding place Jonathan had with Mathias, a tiny secret chamber with neither window nor door; the only way in was though the shutter behind the sideboard. There was no furniture in it, only a feather mattress to sleep on, and an old horn lamp which dispelled the darkness in there a little.

  In the light of this lamp, Jonathan wrote a message to Sofia. “The name of the traitor, who shall be cursed forever, is Jossi the Golden Cockerel. Get him quickly. My brother is here now.”

  “That was why Bianca came flying in yesterday evening,” said Jonathan. “To tell us that you had disappeared and had gone to find me.”

  “Just think, that means Sofia understood the puzzle I wrote on the kitchen wall,” I said. “When she came with the soup.”

  “What puzzle?” said Jonathan.

  “I’ve gone to find him far, far away beyond the mountains.”

  I told him what I had written.

  “I did that so that Sofia wouldn’t be worried,” I said.

  Jonathan laughed.

  “Not be worried—that’s what you think. And me? How calm do you think I was when I learned that you were somewhere up in the mountains of Nangiyala!”

  I must have looked ashamed, because he hastened to comfort me.

  “Brave little Rusky, it’s wonderful that you were there all the same, and even more wonderful that you are here.”

  That was the first time anyone had ever called me brave and I thought that if I went on in this way, then perhaps I would be able to call myself Lionheart, despite Jossi.

  But then I remembered what else I had written on the wall at home, about someone with
a red beard who wanted white horses. I asked Jonathan to add a line to the message:

  “Karl says all that about red beard is wrong.”

  I also told him how Hubert had saved me from the wolves and Jonathan said that he would be grateful to him for the rest of his life.

  Dusk was falling over Wild Rose Valley as we went to release Bianca, and lights began to go on in all the houses and farms on the slope below us. It looked so calm and peaceful that you might have thought people were now sitting down eating their good evening meal or perhaps just talking to each other and playing with their children or singing little songs to them and enjoying life. But you knew it wasn’t like that. You knew that they had hardly anything to eat and that they weren’t calm and happy, only unhappy. Tengil's men up on the wall with their swords and spears helped you to remember how things were, in case you might forget.

  There were no lights in Mathias’s windows. His house was dark, and everything was silent, as if there weren’t a living soul in it. But we were there, not in the house, but outside, Mathias standing guard at the corner of the house, and Jonathan and I crawling among the wild roses with Bianca.

  There were thickets like that all round Mathias’s place, and wild roses are something I like, for they smell so sweet, not strong, just sweet. But I thought to myself that I would never again be able to smell the scent of wild roses without my heart thumping, and remembering how we crept among the bushes, Jonathan and I, so close to the wall, where Tengilmen were listening and watching, perhaps most of all for someone with the name of Lionheart.

  Jonathan had blackened his face and pulled a hood right down over his eyes. He didn’t look like Jonathan, I must say. But it was dangerous all the same, and he was risking his life every time he left his hiding place in the secret chamber, his hideout, as he called it. A hundred men were searching for him day and night, I knew, and I had told him so, but all he said was:

  “Yes, they can carry on doing that, I think,”

  He had to release Bianca himself, he said, because he wanted to be certain that no one saw her as she flew away.

  The guards on the wall seemed to have a piece of it each to guard. There was a fat one patrolling up and down all the time on the top of the wall just behind Mathias’s place, and we had to watch out for him.

  But Mathias was standing at the corner of the house with his horn lamp, and he arranged with his how he would signal. This is what he said:

  “When I hold the lamp down low, then you mustn’t even breathe, for then Fatty Dodik is quite close. But when I hold the lamp up high, then he’s over where the wall curves away and he usually talks to another Tengilman there. That’s when you must let Bianca go.”

  And that’s what we did.”

  “Fly, fly,” said Jonathan. “Fly, my Bianca, over the mountains of Nangiyala to Cherry Valley. And watch out for Jossi’s arrows.”

  I don’t know whether Sofia’s pigeons really did understand human speech, but I think perhaps Bianca did, because she laid her beak against Jonathan’s cheek as if wishing to calm him, and then she flew away. She glimmered white in the dusk, so dangerously white. How easily Dodik could have seen her as she went flying over the wall.

  But he didn’t. He was probably standing there talking, neither seeing nor hearing anything. Mathias was keeping watch, and he did not lower the lamp.

  We saw Bianca disappear and I pulled at Jonathan because I wanted him to go quickly back to the hiding place. But Jonathan didn’t want to. Not yet. It was such a lovely evening, the air cool and pleasant to breathe. He had no desire to creep back into a stuffy little room. No one could understand that better than I, who had lain for so long in the kitchen at home in town.

  Jonathan was sitting in the grass with his arms around his knees, looking down toward the valley quite calmly. One might have thought that he was considering sitting there all evening, however many Tengilmen were patrolling the wall behind him.

  “Why are you sitting there?” I said.

  “Because I like it,” said Jonathan. “Because I like this valley at dusk. And the cool air on my face—I like that too. And wild pink roses that smell of summer.”

  “So do I,” I said.

  “And I like flowers and grass and trees and fields and forests and beautiful small lakes,” said Jonathan. “And when the sun rises and when the sun sets and when the moon is out and the stars twinkle and a few other things that I can’t remember at the moment.”

  “I like those things too.”

  “Everyone likes them,” said Jonathan. “And if that’s all people ask for, can you tell me why they can’t have peace and quiet without a Tengil coming along and destroying everything?”

  I couldn’t answer that. Then Jonathan said:

  “Come on, we’d better go in.”

  It had gown dark. You couldn’t see Mathias any longer, only the light from the lamp.

  “He’s holding it up high. No Dodik there,” said Jonathan. “Come on.”

  But just as we began to run, the light from the lamp sank like lightning and we had to stop suddenly. We heard horses approaching at a gallop and then how they slowed down and someone spoke to Mathias.

  Jonathan gave me a little nudge in the back.

  “Go on,” he whispered. “Go over to Mathias.”

  Then he threw himself straight into a wild rose thicket, and trembling and afraid, I walked toward the lamplight.

  “I just wanted a bit of air,” I heard Mathias saying. “It’s such lovely weather this evening.”

  “Lovely weather,” replied a rough voice. “There’s the death penalty for being out after sunset, didn’t you know that?”

  “A disobedient old grandfather, that’s what you are,” said another voice. “Where’s the boy, anyway?”

  “He’s just coming,” said Mathias. I was now quite near him, and I recognized those two on the horses, I did. It was Veder and Kader.

  “Are you off up into the mountains to look at the moonlight tonight, then?” said Veder. “What was your name, now, you little rascal? I didn’t catch it.”

  “I’m just called Rusky,” I said. I dared say that because no one knew that name, neither Jossi nor anyone else, only Jonathan and I and Mathias.

  “Rusky, indeed,” said Kader. “Now listen, Rusky, why do you think we’ve come here?”

  I felt as if my legs would give way beneath me.

  To put me into Katla Cavern, I thought. They must have regretted letting me go, of course, and now they had come to fetch me. What else?

  “Well, you see,” said Kader. “We ride around this valley in the evenings to see that people are obeying what Tengil has decided. But your grandfather finds it hard to grasp; perhaps you could explain to him how bad it would be for both of you if you don’t stay indoors after dark.”

  “And don’t forget,” said Veder. “You won’t escape a second time if we find you where you shouldn’t be; remember that, Rusky. If your grandfather lives or dies; it’s all the same to us. But you, you are so young, you want to grow up and become a Tengilman, don’t you?”

  A Tengilman, no, I’d rather die, I thought, but I didn’t say so. I was terribly anxious about Jonathan and I dared not annoy them, so I answered very meekly:

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Good,” said Veder. “Then you can go down to the big landing stage early tomorrow morning and you’ll be able to see Tengil, the liberator of Wild Rose Valley. Tomorrow he is crossing the river of The Ancient Rivers in his golden sloop and is disembarking at the big landing stage.”

  Then they prepared to leave, but Kader reined in his horse at the last moment.

  “Listen, old man,” he shouted at Mathias, who was already halfway to the house. “You haven’t seen a handsome fair-haired youth called Lionheart anywhere, have you?”

  I was holding Mathias’s hand and I felt how he trembled; but he answered calmly:

  “I know no Lionheart.”

  “Oh, don’t you?” said Kader. “But if you happen t
o meet him, then you know what happens to anyone who gives him shelter or hides him? The death penalty, you know?”

  Then Mathias closed the door behind us.

  “Death penalties here and death penalties there,” he said. “That’s all those people think about.”

  The sound of horses’ hoofs had hardly died away when Mathias was out with the lamp again. Jonathan soon appeared, his hands and face scratched by thorns but glad that nothing worse had happened and that Bianca was now in full flight over the mountains.

  Later on, we had our evening meal in the kitchen at Mathias’s, with the shutter open so that Jonathan could quickly disappear into his hiding place if anyone came.

  But first we went out to the stable, Jonathan and I, and fed our horses. It was wonderful to see them again, standing with their heads close together. I suppose they were telling each other about everything that had happened. I gave both of them some oats. At first, Jonathan tried to stop me, but then he said:

  “Yes, let them have some for once. But you don’t give oats to horses and longer here in Wild Rose Valley.”

  When we went into the kitchen, Mathias had put a bowl of soup on the table.

  “We haven’t anything else, and it’s mostly water,” he said. “But at least it’s hot.”

  I looked around for my sack, remembering what was in it, and when I pulled out all my loaves and my smoked meat, both Jonathan and Mathias gasped, and their eyes began to shine. It was a marvelous feeling to have what was almost a feast to offer them. I cut thick slices of meat and we ate soup and bread and smoked meat; we ate and ate and ate. No one said anything, not for a long white, then at last Jonathan said:

  “Oh, to have had enough to eat! I ‘d almost forgotten what it was like to be full!”

  I became more and more pleased that I had come to Wild Rose Valley; it felt more and more right and good. Then I had to tell properly about everything that had happened to me from the moment I had ridden away from home until Veder and Kader had helped me into Wild Rose Valley. I had already told them most of it, but Jonathan wanted to hear it several times, especially about Veder and Kader. He laughed about that, just as I had thought he would. And Mathias did too.