Once a week she comes walking over fifteen miles of mountain trails, to be ready for business bright and early on Bazaar Day. This week she has brought jars of kos (the thickened but not soured milk that she makes by putting three sprigs of grape vine into the boiled milk) and plums and baskets, and on the way she has been knitting. When she finishes the gay sock pinned to her jacket she will sell that, too.
The young man in the American army shirt had listened not at all to the story of the ora, but he heard Frances’s words and misunderstood them. “Alexander the Greek?” he repeated. “Alexander was not Greek; he was Albanian.”
“You mean his mother was an Albanian,” said Frances.
The young man smiled scornfully. “And you think his father was not? When has a king of Albania married a foreign wife? Albanians marry Albanians. When Filip the Second married, he married a woman of his own people, but of another tribe, as the custom has always been. Do the Greeks dare to say that Filip was a Greek? If he had been Greek, no Albanian chief would have given him a daughter for wife. Even then we Malisori[4] despised the Greeks.”
“But Philip of Macedonia—was a Macedonian,” I said, feebly. “Wasn’t he a Macedonian? The Macedonians weren’t Albanians, were they?”
“Ask the old man what he knows about Lec i Madhe, Rexh,” said Frances. But the old man, drawing solace from the amber mouthpiece with his toothless lips, still brooded upon the song of the man of Mali Sharit.
“The things which I have told happened to an Albanian of the tribe of the Mali Sharit,” he said. “The song of them has been sung by the Malisori from the days when they happened till the days of my own father’s manhood. The Greeks are a little, inquisitive people who have played with paper and with writing since they first came to our shores in boats, long ago—a hundred hundred years before the Romans came. We gave them shelter then, we let them come to our shores, we let them come from the cold seas and stay on our land, and they are guests who steal from their hosts. They have killed our people; they have taken Janina. Let them leave our songs and our kings alone. Greek!” said he, muttering. “They will be claiming the Mali Shoshit, next!”
Excitement so shook my fingers that the writing wavers on the page. The blotted and rain-smeared notebook before me now evokes like a crystal before the gazer the picture of that old man in the warm duskiness of the house of Sadiri Luka, the streaming of rain on the roof, the smell of coffee and cigarette smoke, the soft sound of moccasined feet going down the corridor to confession at the knee of Padre Marjan.
“The Greeks came to your shores?” I said, goading the old man on. “But it is written in the books that they came from the lands watered by the Danube, by the river that flows through Belgrade to the Black Sea. It is written that they came down through the Balkans to build their great and beautiful cities on the shores of the Ægean. And no one writes about the Albanians. Where did the Albanians come from?”