For Tengil made all the men of Wild Rose Valley stand in a row in front of him, and with his cruel forefinger, he pointed out which of them were to be taken across the river to Karmanyaka. I knew what that meant, for Jonathan had told me. None of those whom Tengil pointed out would ever come back alive. They would have to toil in Karmanyaka and haul stones up to the fortress which Tengil was having built on the top of the mountains of The Ancient Mountains. A fortress that could never be conquered by an enemy, it was to be, and there Tengil was to sit in his cruelty, year in and year out, and at last feel safe. But a great many bondsmen went into building such a fortress, and they all had to toil until they fell.
“And then Katla gets them,” Jonathan had said. When I remembered that, I shuddered in the warm sunlight. Katla was still only a horrible name to me then, nothing more.
It was quiet in the square while Tengil was pointing, only a little bird high up in the top of a tree above him singing and a trilling beautifully, unaware of what Tengil was doing down there under the lime trees.
Then there was the weeping, too. It was pitiable to hear how they all wept, all the women who would lose their husbands and all the children who would never see their fathers again. Everyone wept; I too.
Tengil did not hear the weeping; he just sat on his horse and pointed and pointed and the diamond on his forefinger flashed every time he condemned someone to death. It was terrible; he condemned people to death with nothing but his forefinger.
But one of the men he pointed at must have gone mad when he heard his children crying, for suddenly he broke out of the line, and before the soldiers could stop him, he had rushed up to Tengil.
“Tyrant!” he shouted. “One day you’ll die, too, have you thought about that!”
And then he spat on Tengil.
Tengil did not move a muscle. He just made a sign with his hand and the solider nearest raised his sword. I saw it flashing in the sunlight, but just then Jonathan grasped the back of my neck and pressed me to his chest, hiding my face, so that I saw no more. But I felt, or perhaps I heard, the sobs in Jonathan’s breast, and as we walked home, he was weeping, which he never usually does.
They grieved in Wild Rose Valley that day. Everyone grieved. Everyone except Tengil’s soldiers. One the contrary, they were pleased every time Tengil came to Wild Rose Valley, for then he gave all his Tengilmen a feast. The blood from the wretched man who had been killed had hardly dried in the square when a huge vat of beer was brought there, and pigs were roasted on spits so that the fumes lay thick over Wild Rose Valley, and all the Tengilmen ate and drank and boasted about Tengil, who gave them so many good things.
“But they’re Wild Rose Valley’s pigs they’re eating, the bandits,” said Mathias, “and Wild Rose Valley’s beer they’re drinking.”
Tengil himself was not at the feast. When he had finished pointing, he had gone back across the river.
“And now he’s probably sitting contentedly in his castle, thinking he’s struck terror into Wild Rose Valley,” said Jonathan, as we walked home. “He probably thinks that there is nothing left here but terrified bondsmen now.”
“But he’s wrong there,” said Mathias. “What he doesn’t understand, that Tengil, is that he can never subdue people who are fighting for their freedom and who stick together as we do.”
We went past a little house with apple trees all around it, and Mathias said:
“That’s where the man they killed lived.”
A woman was sitting on the steps outside. I recognized her from the square and remembered how she had screamed when Tengil had pointed at her husband. Now she was sitting with a long pair of scissors in her hand, and she was cutting off her long fair hair.
“What are you doing, Antonia?” Mathias said. “What are you going to do with your hair?”
“Bowstrings,” she said.
She didn’t say anything else, but I’ll never forget the look in her eyes when she said that.
Many things brought the death penalty in Wild Rose Valley, Jonathan had told me, but the worst offense was to carry weapons; that was forbidden more than anything else. Tengil’s soldiers went around looking everywhere in houses and yards, hunting for hidden bows and arrows and hidden swords and spears. But they never found anything. And yet there wasn’t a house or a yard where there weren’t weapons hidden and weapons forged for the battle that had to come in the end, Jonathan said.
Tengil had also promised white horses as a reward for those who revealed secret weapon hoards.
“How foolish,” said Mathias. “Does he really think that there’s a single traitor here in Wild Rose Valley?”
“No, it’s only in Cherry Valley where there’s one,” said Jonathan sadly. Yes, I knew it was Jonathan walking there beside me, but it was difficult to remember it, the way he looked with that beard and those rags.
“Jossi hasn’t seen what we’ve seen of cruelty and oppression,” said Mathias. “Otherwise he could never do what he’s doing.”
“I wonder what Sofia’s doing?” said Jonathan. “And I’d like to know if Bianca got there alive.”
“We must hope that she did,” said Mathias. “And that Sofia has put a stop to Jossi by now.”
When we got back to Mathias’s house we saw Fatty Dodik lying in the grass, playing dice with three other Tengilmen. They must have been off duty, I think, because they lay there among the wild rose bushes all the afternoon. We could see them from the kitchen windows. They played dice and ate meat and rank beer, which they had brought from the square, whole pails full. Gradually they gave up playing dice. Then they ate the meat and drank beer. Then they just drank beer. And then they did nothing, just crawled around like beetles in the bushes. Finally, they all four fell asleep.
Their helmets and cloaks lay in the grass where they had flung them, for no one could drink beer in a thick woolen cloak on such a warm day, could he?
“But if Tengil knew, he’d have them flogged,” said Jonathan.
Then he vanished out through the door, and before I even had time to be afraid he was back with a cloak and a helmet.
“What do you want those dreadful things for?” said Mathias.
“I don’t know yet,” said Jonathan. “But a time may come when I’ll need them.”
“A time may come when you’ll be caught too,” said Mathias.
But Jonathan tore off his beard and rags and put on the helmet and cloak, and there he stood, looking just like a Tengilmen; it was horrible. Mathias shuddered and asked him for God’s sake to hide those dreadful things in the hideout.
Jonathan did so.
Then we lay down and slept for the rest of the day, so I don’t know what happened when Fatty Dodik and his companions woke up and started sorting out whose helmet and whose cloak had gone.
Mathias was asleep too, but he woke up for a while, he told us afterward, to the sound of shouts and swearing from out in the wild rose thickets.
That night, we went on working on the underground passage.
“Three more nights,” said Jonathan. “no more.”
“And then what’s going to happen?” I asked.
“Then what I’ve come for will happen,” said Jonathan. “Maybe it won’t be successful, but I must try anyhow. To free Orvar.”
“Not without me,” I said. “You can’t leave me behind again. Wherever you go, I’m coming with you.”
He looked at me for a long time, and then he smiled.
“Well, if you really want to, then that’s what I want,” he said.
Chapter 11
Tengil’s soldiers were all revived by so much meat and beer, and every one of them must have wanted those twenty white horses, for they started frantically searching for Jonathan. They foraged about from morning to night, searching every house and every corner in the valley. Jonathan had to stay in his hideout until he was almost suffocated.
Veder and Kader rode around everywhere, reading out the proclamation about my brother. I, too, took the opportunit
y of hearing about “Tengil’s enemy, Jonathan Lionheart, who had illegally surmounted the wall and whose whereabouts in Wild Rose Valley were still unknown.” They described him, too: “A remarkably handsome youth, with fair hair, dark blue eyes, and slim of figure,” they said, and that was how Jossi had described him, I’m sure. And again I heard about the death penalty for sheltering Lionheart and the reward for the person who betrayed him.
While Veder and Kader were riding around trumpeting all this, people were coming to Mathias’s house to say farewell to Jonathan, and to thank him for everything he had done for them, which was probably a lot more than I knew about.
“We’ll never forget you,” they said with tears in their eyes, and they brought bread with them and gave it to him, although they had hardly anything to eat themselves.
“You’ll need it, because it’s a difficult and dangerous journey you’re undertaking,” they said, and then they hurried away to listen to Veder and Kader once again, just for the fun of it.
Soldiers came to Mathias’s house too. I was sitting terrified on a chair in the kitchen as they came in, not daring to movie, but Mathias was bold.
“What are you looking for?” he said. “I don’t believe that Lionheart youth even exists. It’s something you’ve invented so that you can go around messing up people’s houses.”
They certainly messed up the place. They began in the little bedroom, where they tipped all the bedclothes onto the floor. Then they rummaged through a cupboard in there, throwing out everything that was inside it, which was fairly silly. Did they really think Jonathan was hiding in a cupboard?
“Aren’t you going to look inside the pot cupboard too?” asked Mathias. But that made them angry.
Then they came out into the kitchen and set about the sideboard, and I sat on my chair feeling the hatred riding up inside me. It was that evening that we were going to leave the valley, Jonathan and I, and I thought that if they found him now, I wouldn’t know what I’d do. Things couldn’t be so cruel that they caught Jonathan during his last hours in the valley.
Mathias had stuffed the sideboard full of old clothes, sheep’s wool and things, to muffle any sound from the hideout, and they hauled the whole lot out on to the kitchen floor.
And then! Then I wanted to scream so that the house fell down; yes, because one of them put his shoulder against the sideboard to push it to one side. But no sound came out of me. I sat paralyzed on my chair and just hated him, everything about him, his rough hands and thick neck and that wart on his forehead. I hated him because I knew he was now going to see the shutter leading into the hideout, and that would be the end of Jonathan.
But a cry came from Mathias:
“Look! Fire!” he shouted. “Has Tengil ordered you to set fire to our houses too?”
I don’t know how it had happened, but it was true. The sheep’s wool on the floor was burning briskly, and the soldiers had to hurry to put it out. They jumped and stamped and cursed and swore, and finally they tipped the water-barrel over it all, so the fire was out almost before it had started. But Mathias grumbled all the same and was angry with them.
“Have you no sense at all?” he said. “You can’t throw wool down like that right next to a fire, where there are flames and sparks!”
The soldier with the wart was furious.
“Shut up, old man!” he said. “Or I know several ways of shutting that mouth of yours.”
But Mathias would not let them frighten him.
“I hope you’re going to clean up after you,” he said. “Just look what you’ve done! The place looks like a pigsty.”
That was the right way to get them to go away.
“Clean up your own pigsty, old man,” said the man with the wart, and he went out first, the others following, leaving the door wide open behind them.
“They’ve got no sense at all,” said Mathias.
“What luck the fire started though,” I said. “What luck for Jonathan.”
Mathias blew on his fingertips.
“Yes, small fires are quite good things sometimes,” he said. “Though you get burned when you scrape red-hot charcoal out of the fire with your fingers.”
But that wasn’t the end of our miseries, whatever I’d thought.
They searched the stable for Jonathan, too, and then the soldier with the wart came to Mathias and said:
“You’ve got two horses, old man! No one in Wild Rose Valley is allowed more than one, you know that. We’ll send a man over from the other side tonight. He’ll fetch the one with a white blaze, you’ll have to give that one to Tengil.”
“But it’s the boy’s horse,” said Mathias.
“Oh, yes?” But it’s Tengil’s now.”
That’s what the soldier said, and I began to cry. We had to leave Wild Rose Valley that evening, Jonathan and I. Our long underground passage was finished. Not until that moment had I even thought about it—how on earth were we going to take Grim and Fyalar with us? They couldn’t crawl along an underground passage. What a fool I was not to have thought about that before, that we’d have to leave our horses with Mathias. That was bad enough, but why should things turn out even worse? Tengil would take Fyalar; I can’t understand why my heart didn’t break when I heard that.
The soldier with the wart hauled a little wooden tag out of his pocket and held it under Mathias’s nose.
“Here,” he said. “Write your house mark on this.”
“Why should I do that?” said Mathias.
“That means it’ll be a pleasure for you to give a horse to Tengil.”
“I feel no such pleasure.”
But then the soldier drew his sword.
“You certainly do,” he said. “You feel great pleasure and this is where you put your house mark. And then you give the tag to the man who comes over from Karmanyaka to fetch the horse, because Tengil wants proof that you’ve given it voluntarily, do you see, old man?” he said, pushing Mathias so that he almost fell over.
What else could Mathias do? He wrote down his house mark, and the soldiers went off to search elsewhere for Jonathan.
It was our last evening with Mathias. For the last time we sat down at his table, and for the last time he offered us soup. We were sad, all three of us, I most of all. I cried. Because of Fyalar. Because of Mathias. He had almost been my grandfather, and now I was going to leave him. I wept, too, because I was small and scared and could do nothing about soldiers coming like that and pushing my grandfather around.
Jonathan was sitting in silence, thinking, and suddenly he mumbled:
“If only I knew the password.”
“What password?” I said.
“You have to say the password when you go in or out through the main gateway, didn’t you know that?” he said.
“Yes, I know that,” I said. “And I know what the password is, too. ‘All power to Tengil, our liberator.’ I heard Jossi say it. Didn’t I tell you?”
Jonathan stared at me; for a long while he just stared at me, and then he began to laugh.
“Rusky, I do like you,” he said. “Did you know that?”
I didn’t understand why he was so pleased about the password, because he wasn’t going through the gateway anyhow, but I was also a little pleased in all my misery because I had been able to cheer him up with such a small matter.
Mathias had gone into the bedroom to clear up and Jonathan rushed in after him. They talked in low voices to each other in there, but I didn’t hear much, except when Jonathan said:
“If I fail, then you’ll look after my brother, won’t you?”
Then he came back in to me.
“Listen now, Rusky,” he said. “I’ll take the pack and go on ahead, and you must wait here with Mathias, until you hear from me again. It’ll take quite a while, because I’ve got a few things to arrange first.”
Oh, how I disliked that. I’ve never been able to stand waiting for Jonathan, especially when I’m afraid all the time, and I was afraid now, for who knows w
hat might happen to Jonathan on the other side of the wall, and what was he thinking of doing that might fail?
“You mustn’t be so frightened,” said Jonathan. “You’re Karl Lionheart these days. Don’t forget that.”
Then he bade Mathias and me a hasty farewell, crawled into the hideout, and I saw him vanish down into the underground passage. He waved; the last thing I saw was his hand waving to us.
And then we were left alone, Mathias and I.
“Fatty Dodik doesn’t know what kind of mole is burrowing under his wall at this moment,” said Mathias.
“No, but suppose he sees that mole sticking its head up through the earth,” I said. “And then throws his spear!”
I was sad, and I crept out to the stable to Fyalar, for the last time seeking comfort from him. But he couldn’t comfort me, for I knew that after this evening, I would never see him again.
It was dim in the stable, the window small, letting in very little light, but I saw how eagerly Fyalar turned his head as I came in through the door. I went over to the stall and threw my arms around his neck. I wanted him to understand that what had to happen wasn’t my fault.
“Though perhaps it is my fault,” I said, and I wept. “If I’d stayed in Cherry Valley, then Tengil would never have gotten hold of you. Forgive me, Fyalar, forgive me. But I couldn’t do anything else.”
I think he knew I was sad. He nuzzled my ear with his soft nose as if he didn’t want me to cry.
But I cried. I stood there with him and I cried and cried, until there were no more tears inside me. then I groomed him and gave him the last of the oats; well, he shared them with Grim, of course.
I thought such terrible thoughts as I groomed Fyalar.
May he drop dead, the man who was to come and fetch my horse, I thought. May he die before he gets across the river. It was terrible to wish things like that, it really was, and it didn’t help, either.
No, he was almost certainly already on board the ferry. I thought, the ferry they carry all their stolen goods away on. Perhaps he had already landed? Perhaps he was just coming through the gateway and would be here any minute now. Oh, Fyalar, if only we could flee together, you and I.
The Brothers Lionheart Page 9