In the forbidding beauty of the mountains of Montenegro, with World War I already a dark prophecy on the horizon, an English traveller with a keen interest in the tangled politics of the Balkans happens upon a remote valley.

Auberon Harwell is the confidential agent of a powerful English peer who sees advantage in the decline of the Ottoman Empire and threat in the rise of Austria-Hungary. Caught between these powers are the Montenegrin Serbs, whose greatest hero is Danilo Pekocevic patriarch of the valley. He dreams of yet another empire, the one his ancestors lost to the Turks on the Field of Kosovo five hundred years ago. His only son, Toma, loves a girl he cannot marry, the daughter of a neighboring Muslim landowner.

Harwell, against all reason and hope, falls in love with Toma's mother, who prays that her son may emigrate to escape this burden of violence and vengeance. Will Harwell help her? Both Harwell and Toma are bound by agonizing choices and the obligations of honor, duty, and love. From these flow the events of a memorable drama that sets individual destinies, vividly imagined, against the taut background of an unfinished history.