Keepers of the Western Forest

by Chris Kennedy

  Chapter 37

   

  The next morning, they all sat on deck, listening to Broderic as he played his harp and sang for them the tragic story of Sir Tristram and the fair Iseult.

  Although Darin knew the tale already, he had never been so moved by it as now; Shayla, who was hearing it for the first time, was weeping openly by the end.

  “Oh, Broderic,” she sighed, “your words make me see everything so clearly! And your music makes me feel those poor lovers’ sorrows as though they were my own.”

  “It’s true, my friend,” said Darin. “I have never heard you play the harp like that before.”

  Broderic looked down at the instrument in his hands. “Tara’s soul is in it now,” he said. Then he too began to weep silently.

  As the Ariel sailed on through the day, those on board were quiet for the most part. Darin guessed they were all of them trying to take the first step towards coming to terms with an overwhelming sense of loss. He sensed that Broderic’s art had given them a shared starting point, somehow channelling and giving form to their grief. As he looked around his companions, he saw both sorrow and compassion in their eyes.

  By late afternoon, it was plain that Oberon was growing impatient, standing at the wheel and peering intently ahead. “Tonight the moon will be full,” he told Darin. “If I am to accomplish the change and bring you all with me, I must help my memory all I can by recreating certain circumstances as closely as possible. We must be at the island by nightfall.”

  It was evening when they finally caught sight of Avalon, lying directly ahead, due north. Even as Oberon called out, a huge moon appeared over the horizon to their right. It was twice as big as any Darin had ever witnessed at home; he seemed almost able to feel the pull of its magnetic force as it rose above the sea.

  The island was drawing nearer. It was low in the middle, rising to higher, cliff-bound plateaus at either end. Most of the middle part of the southern facing coastline was taken up by a wide bay with a long, sandy beach. Oberon steered the Ariel towards the western end of the bay and soon they were sailing past the high, rocky side of the cape that jutted southwards into the sea on their left. By now, night had fallen and the moon was a third of the way up the sky, shedding a steely light over everything.

  They left the Ariel at anchor out in the bay and lowered a small boat. It took Oberon two trips to row them all ashore, quicksilver jewels aflame with the cold fires of the moon dripping from his oars as they skimmed over the sea. They left the boat drawn up on the beach and started out across the sand.

  “Everything will look much the same when we come back this way,” Oberon told them. “Only it will be a different boat waiting for us.”

  His words reminded Darin of the mysterious nature of their journey; he saw his friends looking at one another wonderingly in the moonlight.

  Soon they had rounded the bay and were climbing up the sides of the cape, heading southwards. As they ascended, the rising moon followed them every step of the way, peering at them through the trees when their path entered a pinewood some fifty feet above the sea.

  Darin began to tell Shayla about his plans to seek out the forests of England and make a home for them there.

  “And when you ride as a knight with the lords of that land, how will you call yourself?” asked Shayla. “Keeper of the Western Forest sounds a little grand, perhaps; people will wonder why they haven’t heard of you before.”

  “You’re right. Maybe something a little more modest, a name that could have come from anywhere. How about Darin of Westwood?”

  “Lady Westwood?” Shayla laughed. “Yes, I like it!”

  It was the first time the sound of laughter had made itself heard since Etaine had told them of Arthur’s downfall. Darin hoped it signalled a change in everyone’s spirits as they neared their goal, a tacit agreement to lay their grief aside for the present and enter wholeheartedly into this shared adventure.

  The last few pine trees were now behind them and they were crossing a flat, desolate landscape to reach the end of the cape. The patches of moss and thin soil underfoot gradually grew sparser until they were walking over bare rock, the bones of Avalon shining white beneath the moon. At last, they found themselves standing on the edge of a high cliff at the southernmost tip of the island.

  Gazing out from this high, rocky vantage point, Darin remembered what Stella had once told him about worlds floating among the stars. On three sides of him, far below, lay the sea. The low horizon was barely discernible, so alike in shade were sea and sky; a wide, uninterrupted curve from end to end. No longer was he a tiny figure, creeping through the forests of a vast, flat world; no, he was standing at the prow of some great ship, voyaging through the endless reaches of space. He lifted his eyes higher to watch the moon riding overhead and in the stillness of the night, he seemed to hear a faint sound, as if two high, singing notes from opposite ends of the firmament were meeting and vibrating in his head. He had a rush of giddiness and stepped back from the edge of the cliff. He saw Stella’s brother regarding him from under the wide brim of his hat.

  “The music of the spheres,” said Oberon.

  He can read our minds, thought Darin, and turned to look at the rest of his companions. They stood before him, transformed by the moonlight into heroic statues: his mother, tragic but indomitable, who had found brief happiness with his father, only to have it snatched away from her again; Broderic, his handsome features refined by sorrow, his eye fixed on some high inner goal; Stella, the immortal, perfectly at home in this lunar vision. And Shayla, his hope and his strength.

  “It’s time,” said Oberon.

  The moon had now reached the highest point in the sky. Its light, pouring down on them from above and reflecting off the waters below was so intense that sea, sky and rock fused into one great, silver radiance. Darin was unsure whether Oberon was speaking to them out loud or directing their minds with his thoughts alone as the spellbound companions moved quietly together and joined hands to stand in a circle, looking at one another in wonder.

  “Now,” said Oberon softly. “Close your eyes.”

  A Letter from Robert Westwood to his Grandson

   

  Dear Bryn,

  I hope you have been enjoying the stories I sent you for your birthday. I typed them up from my father’s old notebooks.

  If people knew what I have come to believe concerning these tales, they would declare me insane. So I tell no one—not even you. What I will do, however, is relate two curious incidents from my own life.

  I must begin by explaining that when your great grandfather started telling me about Darin and his friends, just after the war—that’s the Second World War, lad—he insisted they were true stories about our ancestors. Some mysterious character he met in a library had given him them, he claimed. Once, when I was still quite small, we were on holiday down south. He took me into an old Norman church somewhere and showed me a slab of black stone, about five feet long, set into the floor. On it was carved a coat of arms and the name Wester-woode. He pointed out the device on the shield. “That’s an oak tree,” he said. It was worn almost smooth; but I suppose it did look something like a tree.

  By the time I was your age, I knew a bit about history. King Arthur had never existed, so the tales about Darin and the Knights of the Round Table couldn’t possibly be true, I said. My father looked at me in an odd sort of way, I remember, and finally admitted with a sigh that he had made them up. Some years later, I asked him what first gave him the idea for them. It was a game of Scrabble, he said; the words ‘spotty’ and ‘knight’ appeared together. That made him think of some poor knight who had to keep his visor shut all the time! (The spots, of course, didn’t make it through to the story, just the closed visor).

  So that’s what I grew up believing—and would have continued to believe, were it not for the following events:

  Back in the nineteen-seventies, when your father was younger than you are now, we lived on the island of I
biza. One winter, I went to London by myself on business. It was an icy November afternoon, I remember, as I crossed Trafalgar Square and headed for Charing Cross road, pulling my coat collar up round my ears and cursing the miserable English climate. I could picture the whitewashed kitchen windowsill back on the island, bright in the warm morning sun. Before I went home, though, I wanted to get in a good supply of books, so I was on my way to Foyles—a wonderful place in those days, lots of floors and endless corridors. I was sure I’d find everything I wanted there—except, perhaps, one particular book, a long fourteenth century poem, Gawain and the Green Knight.  At that time, for some reason, I imagined it might be rather obscure. I suddenly thought of the little bookshop my father used to visit in a side street off Charing Cross road. Perhaps I should have a look there first, get out of the blasted cold for a bit. I knew they had all kinds of odd books about esoteric religions, folk tales, legends and so on.

  There was a musty smell in the shop—not only new stuff here, but all sorts of rare old volumes.  I stamped my feet to get some feeling back into them and looked around. A bloke in an old tweed jacket was at the counter, busy marking something in the back pages of a pile of old books.  “Gawain and the Green Knight?” he mumbled, chewing on the end of his pencil. “I don’t have it in stock, I’m afraid. I can’t tell you much about what editions are available either, not off the top of my head at any rate.” Then a voice came from the other side of the shop. “Are you a student then? Of medieval languages, I mean?”

  I turned and found myself looking into a pair of intense, cold blue eyes. A tall man about my own age was staring at me from under the brim of a soft black fedora. “Not really,” I said. “Well,” said the stranger, “you might find The Green Knight a little difficult in the original.” He put the book he had been examining back on the shelf and came over to join me. All at once, he threw back his head, closed his eyes and intoned a few words of incomprehensible gibberish. “From the poem in question,” he explained. “Up went the axe, then it came swishing down, straight for the naked neck. Or words to that effect.”

  English in the fourteenth century was very different to the way it is now, Bryn, and The Green Knight is even more peculiar. It’s in a sort of northern dialect. I confess I couldn’t understand a word, but the man in the felt hat said not to worry, there was a very readable modern translation available in paperback. “Any good bookshop should have it—except this one, of course,” he said, grinning at the man in the tweed jacket. Then he stuck out his hand. “Auberon Dufay.”

  When I introduced myself in turn, he raised his eyebrows. “Robert Westwood? Not by any chance Bernard Westwood’s son, Bobby?” I nodded, mildly surprised. “Ah, yes, I knew some relatives of yours, long ago,” he said. “My sister told me she saw you once, in Cambridge.” Now I was even more surprised. I hadn’t been back to Cambridge since we moved up to Yorkshire at the end of the war. This remarkable fellow in the black hat and ankle-length coat—looking, if anything, younger than I was myself—was talking like one of those elderly family friends I would meet occasionally, who still knew me as Bobby.

  When I said I was on my way to Foyles, Auberon glanced around the shop. “I’m all done here,” he said, “and I’m headed in that direction myself. Why don’t we walk together?”

  Our breath hung in clouds before us as we stepped out into the freezing air. As we turned up Charing Cross Road, I took a sidelong glance at Dufay. He certainly cut a striking figure against the drab London surroundings, hat slouched over his eyes and long black coat, open despite the cold, flapping at his heels like a scholar’s gown.  I was intrigued—enough so, that when he invited me to have something in the café next to Foyles, I agreed.

  Over hot tea, we talked of this and that. It turned out he knew Ibiza well. I wasn’t particularly surprised—Dufay’s flamboyant style would not be so out of place there. Then he asked me why I was interested in the Green Knight poem. I had always been fascinated by King Arthur and his knights, I said. I told him about my father’s stories and how I was thinking about writing some more for my son. The idea seemed to amuse him. “Carrying on the family tradition, eh?” he said. He offered to look me up the next time he was in Ibiza—maybe he could help me with my project. He was some sort of literary agent, apparently.

  This led to a discussion on Arthurian matters in general. He knew a lot, that was clear, and some of his opinions were rather unorthodox. Do you remember when we watched that DVD together, with King Arthur as a Roman legionary helping the Britons against the Saxons in the fifth century? You wondered why the well-known stories were always about knights in armour. Were they all wrong? I told you then that, despite all the theories about some real figure behind the legends, the one indisputable historical fact we have is that the tales of the Round Table were written in the twelfth century—the age of the Crusades, of tournaments and chivalry.

  Well, when I mentioned during my conversation with Dufay the endless discussion that goes on about whether or not those old writers got their stories from some earlier source, he said they did—and claimed he knew what, or rather who, that source was. “It was a minstrel,” he said. “One whose harping and singing was truly inspired. People who heard him perform at the courts he passed through were so moved by the experience that it changed them forever. They all scurried off to write down whatever they could remember.” He sounded so matter-of-fact, I almost believed he did know more than all the experts. When I asked him where he got all this from, he laughed. “Let’s just say I’m in a privileged position,” he said.

  I asked him to tell me more about his line of work. “I just adore stories,” he said. “They are the greatest thing we can pass on. They all weave together into the greatest story of them all, the story of our lives on this planet. I shall always seek out the best story-tellers of the day.”

  “My father wove quite a few things from other stories into his own stuff, come to think of it,” I said. “He had names from Shakespeare in there, and a boat called The Ariel. I suppose he knew that was the name of the poet Shelley’s boat too. The one he was drowned in.”

  Auberon chuckled softly. He looked down at the table. “Excitable chap, Percy,” he murmured.

  I was getting used to the odd feeling I got when he said things like that—as though he knew personally people he couldn’t possibly have met. It was just his manner, I told myself.

  Then Auberon asked me, with a funny twinkle in his eye, if I had ever wondered where my father got his stories from. I told him about the Scrabble game and everything. Next, he asked me when my father had first told me them. Not long after the war, I said—nineteen forty-six, seven at the latest. He stared at me for a while, as though he were trying to work something out. Then he stood up. “Time to go,” he said. “I’ll see you on Ibiza.”

  He left me at the entrance to Foyles and set off in the direction of Oxford Street. Before he had gone more than two or three paces, however, he stopped and looked back. The wind was whipping at his coat tails; he held his fedora jammed down on his head. ”The next time you come across a Scrabble set, have a look in the corner of the board,” he called out. “I think you’ll find the game wasn’t put on the market until nineteen fifty-two. Good hunting!” And off he went.

   

  The second incident happened on Formentera, a small island close by Ibiza. It was the summer after my meeting with Auberon Dufay. I took the little boat over to Formentera to go to a party at a musician friend’s house down on the Cap de Berberia, a high, cliff-bound cape, the southern-most tip of the island.

  It was the night of full moon. Everyone was outside; guitars and flutes were playing; people strayed in and out of the pinewoods that surrounded the house. Round about midnight, I wandered off alone down a footpath leading to the cliffs at the very end of the cape. It was a desolate landscape, bare rock mostly, shining white in the moonlight. I stood at the edge of the cliff gazing out over the sea. The coast of North Africa lay down there; I found myself rememberi
ng the time I had spent in Morocco, years before.

  The moon was now directly above my head. Because I was right at the end of the cape, the sea lay before me and on either side, reflecting dazzling moonlight back up at me. Suddenly it was as though I were suspended in space—rock, sea and sky all one immense encompassing ocean of silver light.

  It was then that my memories of Morocco made me think of the land of Al-Din and Darin’s final quest. A voice in my head whispered Avalon!—I felt myself on the brink of some impossible realization. Completely oblivious of my situation, I took a pace forward.

  O, Bryn! How can I make you feel what it’s like to step out into the void, to know there’s no way back, that you are about to plunge hundreds of feet to your death? A wild fluttering, high in my chest, lungs full to bursting, breath stopped, disbelief and panic fighting for the upper hand—and, along with it all, an insane elation, as if I really wanted to . . .

  A hand gripped my arm. I felt myself being pulled firmly back from the abyss. I was on white rock again, silver sea and silver sky once more separated by a faint horizon. I turned round to see my rescuer.

  Before me stood a young woman of what I can only describe as an unearthly beauty. Enormous eyes—how shall I ever forget them?—gleaming like ice; long, curling hair, the same glittering flow as the moonlit sea. How could such a slender creature have stopped my fall so effortlessly?

  Her lips parted; I heard a soft voice say Not yet, not yet. I tore my gaze away from her and looked over my shoulder at the cliff edge again. Then, desperately trying to find the first word, I turned to face her.

  Gone. Vanished. Utterly.

   

  Well, lad, enough of my reminiscences. You can make of them what you like. I look forward to seeing you again soon. Maybe I’ll ask your parents if I can take you to Formentera in the summer holidays. I’m sure you’d love it there, and I have a bit of a yen to see it again. What do you think ?

   

  Lots of love, Grandpa.

   

  *  *  *

  If you enjoyed this book and would like a printed and illustrated paperback edition, enquire at:

  chris-ivon@hotmail.co.uk