The Brothers Lionheart

And then the fire gets smaller and smaller, until only the embers are left, and the shadows thicken in the corners, and I get sleepier and sleepier, and I lie there and don’t cough and Jonathan tells me things. Tells me and tells me and tells me, and in the end I heard his voice just like those whisperings again, and then I fall asleep. That’s exactly what I like, and that’s what it was like that first evening at Knights Farm, and that’s why I’ll never forget it.

chapter 4

And the next morning we went riding. Oh, yes, I could ride, and yet it was the first time I’d ever been on horseback--I can’t understand how things are like that in Nangiyala, that you can do just anything, I mean. I galloped on as if I’d never done anything else.

But Jonathan when he was riding! The woman who had thought that my brother liked a prince in a saga, she should have been there as he came swooping along on his horse through the meadows in Cherry Valle, then she would have seen a saga prince that she never would have forgotten! Oh, as he came at a gallops and then leapt over the stream, as if flying, so that his hair was flowing around him, yes, you really could believe that he was a prince in a saga. He was nearly always dressed like that, or perhaps more like a knight. There were lots of clothes in a cupboard at Knights Farm, wherever they had come from, and they weren’t anything like the clothes we have nowadays, but just like a knight’s clothes. We had taken some out for me, too, having thrown away my ugly old rags, which I never wanted to see again. For Jonathan said we must be dressed so that it suited the times we were living in now; otherwise the people in Cherry Valley would think we were peculiar. The days of campfires and sagas; wasn’t that what Jonathan had said? As we were riding around in that beautiful valley of ours, I asked him:

“They must be dreadfully olden days that we’re living here in Nangiyala, mustn’t they?

“You could say that, in some ways,” said Jonathan. “They’re olden days for us.