Lullaby of the Valley

ENGLISH
EDITION
Lullaby
of the
Valley4
Tuula Pere
Andrea Alemanno
W
ickWick

Lullaby of the Valley
Story by Tuula Pere
Illustrations by Andrea Alemanno
Layout by Peter Stone
English translation by Mirka Pohjanrinne
Edited in English (US) by Susan Korman
ISBN 978-952-325-865-5 (ePub)
ISBN 978-952-325-365-0 (Print)
First edition
Copyright © 2017 Wickwick Ltd
Published 2017 by Wickwick Ltd
Helsinki, Finland
Printed in EU
Originally published in Finland by Wickwick Ltd in 2017
Finnish “Laakson kehtolaulu”, ISBN 978-952-325-364-3 (Print), ISBN 978-952-325-864-8 (ePub)
English (US) “Lullaby of the Valley”, ISBN 978-952-325-365-0 (Print), ISBN 978-952-325-865-5 (ePub)
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ENGLISH
EDITION
Lullaby
of the
Valley4
Tuula Pere • Andrea Alemanno
W
ickWick
Children’s Books from the Heart

Far away in a distant mountain valley, a family
was getting ready to turn in for the night.
Kaina sat by her grandchildren’s bed, gently
stroking their heads. She was humming a lullaby,
the same song she used to sing to her son when
he was a child.
A caravan moves slowly under a starry sky.
An eagle in the valley soars above, so high.
A little child falls asleep before the night.
Her mother smiles and turns down the light.
Amira, the children’s mother, looked out of the
window. All she could see in the darkness was
light coming from the other houses.
“If only he would come back,” the young mother
sighed.
Grandmother Kaina knew whom she was talking
about.

Everything had changed in the distant
mountain valley when its only two villages
became enemies. Young men had risen up
against each other and taken to the mountains
to battle. Kaina’s son Karam had joined the
troops.
One of the villages sat high on the hillside,
where villagers’ goats grazed. Closer to lowland,
the other village grew grain in rugged fields
spread along the valley. With the men away, the
mothers and grandparents tried to look after
their families, the best they could.
“Never in my life could I have imagined something
like this,” Grandma Kaina sighed. “Our
villages have always lived in peace, but now the
seeds of hate are growing.”

Once the children had fallen asleep, Kaina took her steaming
cup of tea and sat by the window. She wrapped her cold
fingers tightly around it to warm them. There was not much firewood
left; nobody wanted to leave the village to fetch it.
The grandmother wondered how all this evil had come about. That
was a subject of debate in the villages, and accusations flew back
and forth.
“You’ve taken our cattle!” the upland people claimed.
“You’ve fed your goats with grain from our fields!” the lowland
people snapped back.
The dispute had grown worse bit by bit. One day, at the market,
a fight broke out among men from the different villages. Women
and children had withdrawn to the safety of their homes.

Kaina had lived in the valley all her life, as had
many generations before her. She had many
close friends in the neighboring village up on
the hill. Now they couldn’t see each other.
“In a faraway corner of the world like this, what’s
the use of stirring up hate against anyone?” Kaina
said to Amira, who was finishing her kitchen
chores.
“I’m sure it’s no use anywhere,” the young mother
agreed. “Children should have a safe home to
live in.”
Kaina nodded and thought about life in the
villages. In earlier days, nobody had minded that
each village had its own customs and language.
People understood each other well. They were
brought together by the valley, where the joys
and sorrows of big families were very much alike.
“What matters most is that all the children have
enough food to eat and warm clothes to wear,”
Grandma Kaina said. “That’s the most important
lesson to learn in life.”

The villages were located far from the big cities,
along an ancient caravan route. Little by little,
better routes had been discovered, though, and
people traveled elsewhere. The river running along
the bottom of the valley had dried out. All that was
left was a riverbed filled with dry sand and fragments
of rocks.
Remote as they were, the villages had lived sparingly,
but peacefully, for many centuries. Now, spreading
like poison, evil thoughts had invaded the villages.
Fights dispelled the joys they used to share. Doubt
took over people’s minds.
When a storm knocked over a fence in the upland
village, people believed that the lowland folk were
behind it. When the well in the lowland village broke
down, people there were convinced that someone
from the hillside had damaged it.

Fear started to spread among the villagers.
Mothers did not allow children to go out to
play far from home. At sunset, people locked
their doors and covered the windows with thick
cloths.
“How can this be?” Grandma Kaina said one
evening. “We’ve been inside day after day.”

“When can we go to the market again in the
uplands? Or get fresh water from the spring?”
the children kept asking impatiently.
“Soon we may not let you go out at all,” their
mother sighed. “If only your father were here!”

Grandma Kaina had lived a long life. In all her
years, she had had plenty of time to learn
the most important things in life. She had tried
to pass on these lessons to children, especially
her own son.
“My dear son Karam has forgotten everything
I taught him about what truly matters,” Kaina
said sadly. “He’s out there somewhere with
other angry young men, fighting against our
neighbors.”
“But he wants to take care of us,” Amira defended
her husband.
“It’s very hard to do good with a gun in your
hand,” Kaina insisted. “There are far better tools
for taking care of one’s family.”
Amira went back to her chores, while her
children played indoors close to her. Even
though it was already getting dark, Kaina
wanted to go outside.

With a lantern in hand, Kaina took a familiar path that led
away from the village. She wanted to pay a visit to the spring
bubbling up at the bottom of the valley, halfway between the two
villages. The sun had set some time ago; the air had grown colder.
In the darkness, only the mountaintops could be seen, silhouetted
against the starry sky. Somewhere out there was Karam. With a
heavy heart, the woman made her way to the spring, and sat on a
stone with her bucket. She put down the lantern, sheltered it from
the wind, and then wrapped the shawl more tightly around herself.
“I wish Karam were here with me,” she whispered to herself, stroking
her shawl. “The same way he used to be every night when he was
a little boy.”
She started humming, rocking herself slowly from side to side.
Then she sang in a trembling voice:
Hush, little child, the night is falling.
Hear, little child, the winds start calling.
They take you to dreamland, your mother too.
She’s holding your hand and comes with you.

Kaina could hear steps approaching from the
hillside. She turned to see who it was. But
weary of being afraid, she kept on singing.
“It’s just me, your friend Siran,” a woman’s voice
said in the darkness.
“Come and sit next to me,” Kaina said, delighted.
“It’s been too long since we last saw each other.”

“I know that tune,” Siran said. “But we sing it with
different words in my village.”
Before long, sitting side by side by the spring, the
two old women were singing the same lullaby
with different words. At first they sang quietly
and with caution, but little by little, their voices
grew stronger.
The lullaby’s verses echoed in the night in both
languages. Singing together, the aged mothers
poured new life into the old song.

The lullaby’s echo carried through the mountains,
traveling higher and higher, eventually
reaching the camps where the angry young
men stayed. Some of the men were already
asleep, but many were still twisting and turning
restlessly on their hard sleeping pads.
“What do you know . . . That’s one fearless singer
out there!” a tired young man exclaimed. “It
sounds like it’s someone from my home village.”
“Wait, listen. I think there are two singers,”
another soldier said. “Some of the verses are in
the upland language.”
Karam started listening. He knew the lullaby very
well. Tears filled his eyes, and he had to get up.
“I’ll go and have a look,” Karam said. “No need to
come with me. I’ll be fine. It’s just two harmless
old women.”

Karam drew silently closer to the singers. After a while, it
dawned on him—one of the voices belonged to his own
mother! It was the same voice he had listened to as a child every
night, in the safety of his mother’s arms. It was such a long time
ago.
Now Karam was a soldier, and he carried a gun. The song made
him put it down and hide it under a rock next to the path. He
didn’t want to meet his mother and the other singer with a gun
in his hand.
Karam quickened his pace. “Mother, is that really you?” the young
man asked as he approached the spring.
“My son, what took you so long?” Kaina held her son’s face in her
hands, kissing his cheeks. “What have you become?”

Holding the lantern up, the
mother studied her son.
Karam looked exhausted, and
angry furrows had appeared
on his forehead.
“Let me smooth that frown on
your face,” Kaina said gently.
“Come and sit here with me. We
are not in a hurry.”

Karam was a tired
man. He sat down
next to his mother and
leaned his head on her
shoulder. Kaina wrapped her
arm determinedly around her son’s
shoulders and laid his head down on
her knee.
Her heart full of love, Kaina sang
the familiar lullaby to her adult son,
just like years ago. Karam started
breathing more peacefully, and
eventually fell asleep.

Kaina and Siran sang the lullaby
all through the night till the
break of dawn. By morning,
their voices had become a mere
whisper in the cold. Then Siran
said good-bye to her friend and
headed back to her village.

But the lullaby carried on as an echo along the mountain slopes. Traveling with
the wind, it eventually reached the ears of all the angry young men. And it
was not any old tune. It was the song of mothers, coming straight from their
hearts . . . and touching the hearts of everyone who heard it.
Hearing the song, the soldiers of both villages remembered their homes and
families.

When Karam finally woke up at his mother’s
side, the hatred in his heart had melted
away. The young man looked around in amazement.
It was as if a nightmare had come to an
end.
“I have a lot to do,” Karam said. “I will go back to
my friends in the camp. I need to talk to them
about something important.”
“You will return home soon, won’t you?” Kaina
asked anxiously. “Your children and your wife,
Amira, miss you terribly.”
“I will. But first I have to go to the other men. I will
make them see that our place is in our village
with our families.”
The lullaby of the villages never went silent. At
times, the song faded into the background. At
other times it grew louder. When the voices of
the older mothers faded away, new mothers and
fathers continued to sing it to their own children
in their peaceful home valley.

Far away in a distant mountain valley are two villages, where
people have lived peacefully side by side for centuries,
sharing their joys and sorrows. But life in the valley changes
completely when doubt and distrust creep in, and
young men embark on a revenge mission. Fear spreads
among the elderly, women, and children.
Grandma Kaina, a wise and courageous woman, sets
out on a dangerous journey to a spring located
between the villages. The only thing that will
calm down the outbreak of hate is the gentle
weapon of grandmothers.
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