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Main > Fairy tale > All authors > Astrid Lindgren > Fairy tale "The Brothers Lionheart"

The Brothers Lionheart

I hurried to mount Fyalar, for I wanted to get away from that place; oh how I wanted to get away.

“Where are you off to?” shouted Hubert.

“I think I’ll go and meet Jonathan,” I said, and I could hear how scared and feeble I sounded.

“Yes, do that, you oaf,” shouted Hubert. “Just go and kill yourself, I won’t stop you any longer.”

But by then I was already riding away at full speed and could ignore Hubert.

In front of me in the moonlight the path wound its way farther up the mountain. Gentle moonlight it was, almost like daylight, so that you could see everything. What luck! Other wise I would have been lost. It was like riding in a dream, for there were precipices and chasms which made you dizzy; how terribly and beautiful it was! It was like riding in a dream: yes, that moonlight landscape could only exist in some lovely wild dream, I thought, and I said to Fyalar:

“Who do you think is dreaming it? Not me. There must be someone else who has been able to dream up something so unnaturally terrible and beautiful; perhaps it was God?”

But I was so tired and sleepy that I could hardly stay in the saddle. I would have to rest somewhere for the night.

“Preferably where there aren’t any wolves,” I said to Fyalar, and I think he agreed with that.

Who, then, had tramped up the mountain paths between Nangiyala’s valleys from the beginning? Who had thought out how this path to Wild Rose Valley should go? Was it necessary to let it curve its way along such miserable little outcrops, beside such terrible precipices? I knew that if Fyalar as much as put one foot down wrong, then we’d hurtle down into the depths, both of us, and then no one in an eternity of eternities would know what had happened to Karl Lionheart and his horse.

It got worse and worse; in the end, I didn’t dare keep my eyes open, for it we were going to plunge down into the abyss, then I didn’t want to see it.

But Fyalar didn’t put a foot down wrong. He managed, and when I eventually dared to look up again, we had come to a little glade, a fine green glade which had the high, high mountains on one side and a steep precipice on the other.

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