Shadow of a Hero

LEGEND

Selim’s Return

THERE WAS A girl of matchless beauty born in the valley of the Spol.¹ When she was five years old the Turks took her and offered her for sale in Jirin market. There the slave-captain of the Pasha of Jirin saw her, and bought her for his master. Years passed and each year she became yet more beautiful.

When she was almost a woman, Restaur Vax drove the Pashas from Varina, and they fled, taking their households with them to Byzantium. There they found the Sultan greatly vexed for the loss of Varina, and he cast them into his dungeons and ordered their goods to be taken from them and sold, but reserved for himself the best.

Thus it was that the Warden of the Imperial Harem came to the Sultan and said, ‘A young woman of matchless beauty has been entered in the inventory.’ And the Sultan said, ‘Let us see her.’

She was brought and stood before him and looked proudly at him, and without fear, so that he was amazed and said, ‘We are the Sultan of all the world. Are you not afraid?’

She answered, ‘I am a Varinian. How should I be afraid?’

He asked her, ‘Are you Varinians then afraid of nothing?’

‘None of us knows how to be afraid,’ she answered.

‘Not even the little children in the dark of the night?’ he demanded.

At that she laughed and said, ‘When I was a little child, sometimes in the dark of the night I was afraid that Selim Pasha would come for me, but now he is in your dungeons, so I have nothing to fear.’

Then the Sultan sent for his Chief Vizier and said, ‘We have a man called Selim Pasha in our dungeons. Let him be taken from the rack and set free, and restored to his household and his honour. Let gold and armies be given him, as much as he may ask, and say to him that he has a year and a day in which to restore to us, by what means he may, our lost province of Varina. And if he should fail, then his state shall be ten times worse than it is now.’

So it was as the Sultan commanded, and before the ice had melted from the great river, Selim Pasha raised his standards outside the walls of Potok, and behind him stood an army of seventeen thousand bazouks.

¹ The women of Spol Valley are still proverbial for their beauty, as the men are for their stupidity.