The Everlasting — Chapter 26

26

I DON’T KNOW how long I waited.

You would have accounted for every day, but I let them run through my fingers like water. I didn’t want to know how long we’d been apart.

I know it was spring when the sapling first pushed its shoulders up through the earth, head bowed over the pale stem, like a sleeping swan. I fell asleep that night with my cheek pressed to the soil, watching it, and when I woke the first needles were outstretched, tilted toward the dawn.

I know it was summer, that year or the one after, when the first berry budded, hard and green. I touched it with my smallest finger. I thought of our son.

I know it was spring again when a storm blew in from the north, driving the swifts and small animals ahead of it. I curled my body around the yew while lightning struck so near it raised the hairs on my arms and left the taste of metal in my mouth.

I went away from the hill only when I had to, driven by thirst or hunger, and while I was away, I thought only of calamities: a stray hoof, a careless boot, a hard freeze, a hungry fawn, too young to know the needles would sting her mouth. The sapling was growing fast—strangely fast, I thought sometimes—but it was still so fragile, so small.

But I had to hunt. I had to drink at the beck. And when my red cloak finally grew so thin and rotten that it came apart in my hands, like old lace, I had to walk all the way down to Queenswald.

It was not Queenswald yet, of course, but only a handful of cob huts that had gathered like cattle in the valley below. I found the smith and traded the remains of my armor for a rough woolen blanket, a tin pot, flint and steel,

and a bag of dry field peas. Then I turned back and bartered for a second blanket; it might be winter when you returned, and you hated the cold.

The smith did not protest. His eyes moved often to the hilt of Valiance, which I wore always at my hip, and which I refused to trade for any price.

Fight for us, you had said to me, and I will.

Yvanne might be gone, but a crown is a circle, too. The queen is dead, long live the queen. There will be borders drawn and redrawn, wars fought and lost. There will be strangers who come to our wood in search of rebels or deserters, timber for their warships or coal for their engines. They will find us, instead—and they will not find us undefended.

I heard whispers as I left the village. I was not surprised: I was over-tall and badly scarred, rawboned from too many seasons of game and gathered berries. I was a woman, yet I carried a sword. I carried a sword, and yet I served no lord and bore no colors, save the green grass stains on my shirt.

Perhaps she is not a woman or a knight, they whispered, but something else, which dwells in the wastes and wild places.

They began to leave things at the foot of the hills sometimes. A white goat kid, freshly slain. A pair of fine beeswax candles. A cup of wine, full to the brim. Offerings, I finally realized, as you might offer to a spirit or a heathen god.

I tried to repay them, feeling sorry and fraudulent. If a lamb was lost in those hills, it was found penned with the others in the morning. If a band of thieves or brigands passed nearby, they passed quickly onward, without troubling Queenswald. If a woman was chased from the village in the night, her pursuer vanished, and was not heard from again.

They were grateful, I thought, but wary. They did not till the land to the north of the village anymore or let their animals graze in the hills. Already saplings had begun to sprout among the grasses, growing tall and well.

But not as well as the yew. It seemed to bound through the seasons like a hind. Already the earth beneath it was riddled with roots, and the sky was obscured by the green tangle of branches and needles. The trunk was sturdy enough that I might lean my back against it, sometimes, and close my eyes.

Perhaps it was the magic of the yew that made it grow at five times the pace of a natural tree. Or perhaps more time was passing than I reckoned.

Perhaps some nights I lay down beneath the yew and woke seven years later. It was true that sometimes when I went down into the village, I did not recognize their faces. My own face, when I saw it reflected in still water, had not changed.

I suppose time moves strangely, beneath the yew. I did not worry overmuch about it. I only waited, as I had promised I would.

Soon the yew was tall enough to cast a broad circle of shade, and the bark was furrowed and gnarled enough that I could imagine I saw shapes in the grain. There was a place halfway up the trunk that looked like a face, with a twist of wood like a long, arched nose and two knots like black eyes.

I liked to put my back against the yew and rest my skull just below the face.

One day in early autumn I fell asleep there—for an hour, for a century— and when I woke, it was summer. The ulla flowers were in bloom again.

And I was not alone anymore.

I sat for a moment listening to the sound of your breath, as familiar to me as my own pulse. I had waited for a hundred lives, a thousand years— what was another few seconds?

Then I stood and circled the tree. You sat against the other side, your back to the bark, eyes closed. You were whole and alive, just as I remembered you—or nearly so.

Your hair was still curled and tousled, as if you’d just run your fingers through it, but it had turned a pure, unnatural white, like bleached bone.

Like mine. We had both of us been born from the yew, as dragons are, and we were both changed by it.

Your shirt was still unfastened, as I’d left it, but on your bare chest there was now a small, silver scar, just like mine. The scar rose and fell lightly with your breath.

I looked at your face and for a moment I couldn’t tell how old you were.

Every version of you seemed to exist at once, overlapping.

You were the lonely, scrape-kneed boy who had found me in the green shadows between centuries. You were the scholar who had written nothing but lies and the soldier who had fled the field of battle; the bravest coward and the cleverest madman and the traitor with the truest heart; the man who had led me to my death and the man who had died for me.

You were the bastard who had left me here alone, all these years, and you were my best beloved, who always, always came back to me.

Most often I met you with a sword to your throat. This time I knelt over your sprawled legs and touched the tip of my knuckle to the hollow beneath your jaw.

Your long white lashes lifted. You looked up at me as you always did when we met beneath the yew: hungrily, wistfully, as if you didn’t believe I was real but badly wished I was. But your eyes were different, this time: a dark, tawny amber, like winter honey, or spring sap.

And this time when you said my name, it was not Una Everlasting. It was the humble name of a woodcutter’s daughter, the name I have stricken from these pages so that it will be known only by those who knew me.

“Ulla,” you said, and I took your face in both my hands and kissed you, fiercely and furiously, for a long time.

When I let you go, there was blood on both our lips, and I couldn’t say if it was yours or mine. I traced the fine bones of your cheeks with my thumbs, buried my fingers in your pale, pale curls. “You remember, then?

Everything?” I had lain awake for so many nights, wondering what you had lost down under the earth, among the roots and worms.

“I—I don’t know. Some.” There was a haziness in your voice, as if you were recalling dreams you’d had as a child. You added, a little desperately,

“I remember you.”

“That is enough,” I said, and it was.

What you have forgotten, I will tell to you; what I have forgotten, you will tell to me. We will tell our story to one another, not for crown or country, but only for ourselves.

We might even write it all down—you would like that, I think, and why

shouldn’t we?

We have time.

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UNA AND THE YEW

It ends where it began: beneath the yew tree.

You might know the place I mean. If you have ever wandered west, past the village that was once called Queenswald and isn’t now, then you have seen the great wood that covers the hills there. That wood has never been named, nor claimed by any king or country. There have been attempts, over the centuries, but no soldier or surveyor who has entered those woods has found much luck there.

If you have walked into those woods, and farther, to the very heart of them, then you have seen the yew. It stands like a great queen grown old, head bowed—no, there is no sword waiting to be claimed. You’re thinking of a different story—a legend you heard once, or a dream you had as a child.

But it’s true there is a woman who walks sometimes in that place, who wears a huge silver sword at her hip, the hilt long enough for two hands, though she holds it in one. The Keeper of the Yew, they call her, or the Green Knight.

You might have heard stories about her, but they aren’t the kind of stories that are written down in books or studied in school. They’re stories of the small folk, which are only ever whispered or sung. No duels are fought, no crowns are won.

There are not even any heroes, really, although there are plenty of villains.

Here is a tale of the Green Knight: Once there was a dragon sighted in the skies above the wood, and a young prince gathered his men for a dragon hunt. They rode boldly into the wood, and

six days later they came stumbling back out, their arrows broken, their boar spears snapped in two, their mounts set loose in the night. Dragons were still hunted sometimes—they were free things, and what is free will always be hunted—but not in those woods.

Here is another tale: Once there was a great war—there were still wars, too—and a pair of brothers fled from the front lines and ran deep into the woods, ashamed. There they came upon a tall woman with a scar through one eye and hair the color of frost.

The brothers said they sought the Green Knight, that they might learn courage. The woman smiled and told them she would bring them to the bravest man she knew. So the brothers spent the evening talking with a gangling, bespectacled man with a voice like a jackdaw and hair the same eerie, dragon-white as the woman’s.

At the end of that conversation, he led the brothers to the yew and bade them prick their fingers. They fell asleep that night beneath the tree, and when they woke a hundred years had passed, and the war was over.

They are all like this: trickster tales, fairy tales, tales of great men brought low and lowly folk raised high. A lost child is found again, warm and well-fed, with a fortune in ancient gold tucked in her pockets. A hungry mother sends her sons to glean for berries, and they return with a brace of fat brown hares, some of which have tiny balls of lead in their hearts. A highwayman and his merry band hide in the wood from a wicked sheriff, and the sheriff never finds any sign of them but old firepits and arrowheads, as if their camp were abandoned years before.

You will note that the Green Knight is rarely alone, in these stories. I promised her she wouldn’t be, you see.

We live in a cottage in a clearing near the yew. In winter there is smoke curling up from the thatch or, in later years, from a modern metal stovepipe. In autumn there are herbs strung

between the rafters to dry, and in summer the door is propped open with a stone, so the children can flit in and out like swallows.

Yes—there are children. A son and a daughter, as before, as always. On the day her son was born the Green Knight turned his left foot in her hand. When she saw the birthmark there—as round and red as a yewberry—she cried and pressed her lips to the mark.

We even have a horse, although we rarely ride farther than the village. A huge blood-bay gelding, which the knight purchased as a colt, and which lived far longer than any natural horse should. Should you ever come across that horse, I advise you to keep your distance.

The four of us—five, if you count Hen—are not alone. There are the others—discontents and malcontents, deserters and dreamers, outlaws and foreigners—who have come to live in the wood, too. People who were driven from their homes or never had them, who lost wars or refused to win them. The hungry hearted and wistful, who believed children’s stories about the wood where the crown’s power ended, and the Green Knight’s began.

There was a smith who refused to forge another sword; a royal falconer who set his birds free; a young woman who smashed her loom one day at the factory. Some of the Roving Folk passed through, and some of them stayed for a season or two, trading stories, teaching me a little of my mother’s language. I missed them when they left, but I understood; the geweth make our homes where we will.

Once, we were visited by a young and excessively beautiful knight. He had long hair—not golden, but an astonishing shade of orange—and a lost look in his eyes, as if he were searching for someone to serve and could not find her. The Keeper of the Yew invited him to walk with her through the wood, and when they returned there were tears on both their cheeks. The beautiful

knight did not stay long. Before he left, he bowed to me, somewhat ironically, and said he hoped to find a coward of his own one day. I was not wholly sorry to see him go.

More pleasant were the woodcutter and his husband, who the knight greeted by flinging her arms around their necks and kissing both their cheeks frantically. They did not understand it, and the knight never explained herself. But they built their home not far from ours, and they’re fond of the children.

It’s a good life, and a peaceful one. But still, the knight keeps her sword sharp, always within reach, and I carry a revolver in my coat. This is our second happily ever after, you see, and we know they only last as long as you are willing to fight for them.

And no one—no one—fights like she does.

I wish I could tell you her name, but she doesn’t want it remembered. She’s seen the way names become legends become battle cries; soldiers might still go to war, but they will not do it in her name, ever again.

Even still—I don’t want it forgotten. Perhaps it’s the historian in me, or pure pride. Surely she wouldn’t mind if I wrote it in the clumsy cipher my father ta-ught me, here on the very’ last page of a book that I doubt more than one or two people will ever read.. Let me write the word) at least once.

She won’t discover me; she dictated her sections of this book, but she didn’t labor over it, as I did. Perhaps it soothed me, to spend my afternoons fantasizing about setting fire to my manuscript. Perhaps storytelling runs in my family, or one of my families.

Perhaps I am still so damn afraid of forgetting.

I wrote it on ordinary paper, this time—we are careful that no one harvests so much as a fallen twig or dead needle from the yew—and bound it with ordinary glue and twine. I’ve added a few sections from my published translation, for clarity.

Now that it’s finished, I think I’m through with it. I think I will send it bobbing out through time, like a message in a bottle.

There is a professor in the Cantford Department of History who told me to take good notes. Maybe I’ll leave the book in a tomb or a ruin for her. When she discovers it, I hope she’ll whisper By Jove, just for me.

And I hope—will you give this book to my father, Gilda? It might be difficult to find him—I imagine he’s at sea, seeing the world. But if either of you ever wants to visit us, just go to the yew. We’ll be there waiting, centuries ago.

Of course, I’ll be long dead, in your time, and so will the Green Knight. Nothing that lives lasts forever.

The tales disagree on how she died. It wasn’t a glorious death, for certain—there was no great battle, no grand sacrifice, no queen weeping at her bier. They say she lived happily, for a long time—a very long time. There are stories of the Green Knight in every era, after all. They say she died only after her children had grown and left the wood, and returned with their own children, and after those children had left, in turn.

They say one day the knight and the scholar simply laid themselves down among the tangled roots, hand in hand, and did not rise again.

They say it ends where it began: beneath the yew tree.

—Excerpted from The Life of Una Everlasting by Owen Mallory (unpublished manuscript); supplementary materials provided by Gilda Sawbridge

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Received 8-22 Attn: Mallory WOULD BE A HELL OF A STORY WERE IT NOT A CROCK OF SHIT WHICH OF COURSE IT IS BUT JUST IN CASE IT ISNT YOUR FATHER AND I WILL SEE YOU SOON BY WHICH I

MEAN A VERY LONG TIME AGO Gil

Received 8-22 Attn: Mallory PS I KNOW YOU COME BACK SOMETIMES – SYLVIE SAYS YOU RENEWED YOUR LIBRARY

BOOKS Gil

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