The Forebear's Candle: A time travel mystery and love story set against the intrigue of Henry Tudor's England

by Clive S. Johnson

  Jusuf did a quick calculation. “Some six hundred years. Six hundred!” and he let the branch slip from his fingers, wiping its stain from his hand on his breeches.

  As he went down the steps from the churchyard and into the road for the smithy, he stopped and watched a small group of children at play. One, a girl of some four or five years, had a look of Gwenna about her. She’d been pushing a younger boy but then turned and stared at Jusuf. A smile blossomed on her face, and Jusuf smiled back.

  Will my own child be such as this? he thought. She was like a ray of sunshine, now so entranced by his own unusual size and colour. Would he and Gwenna likewise have a girl child? For some reason he believed they would, that the now clear swelling of Gwenna’s belly held such as this mite, still smiling at him from across the road.

  He waved as he set off, and the child waved back. Then she fell to her knees as the boy finally got his own back with a determined push. As a scuffle broke out and a woman came storming out of a doorway, Jusuf saw in his mind’s eye his own daughter: full-grown, belly distended, another girl within. With Allah’s… No, soon to be with this Christian God’s blessing, his line would one day dwell hereabouts, when the phial’s seal would at last let in a Cornish summer’s warm and damp air.

  By the time Jusuf could see the smithy ahead his mood had soured. It must have shown on his face, for unusually few greeted him in passing, though fewer still he noticed in his distraction.

  Despite the cold, he stopped by the spring opposite the smithy. There seemed to be something nudging at his mind that needed both peace and time to be heard. And here, the thin sun warming his face and making his thoughts more fluid, he frowned down into the glistening water.

  “I cannot go back and fashion any better the phial’s seal,” he told himself. “Its wax is the finest there is, but here in this northern land it will fail; I know that now. If only I could warn my daughter’s offspring, and those they beget in times to come, until, in some distant day, one could make good the rotting wax.”

  But how? he thought, then asked the bubbling spring, “How can they be made to hear my warning whilst ensuring its secret’s kept? To hear the warning of their long dead forebear… Forbear?” Sharply, he drew in a breath as the childhood memory of his grandfather’s song drifted hauntingly through his mind.

  Jusuf’s mood had risen greatly by the time he rushed in through the smithy’s wicket door and abruptly came up against Rodrigo, clearly on his way out.

  “Ah, you’re back,” Rodrigo said. “Master Hammett was here earlier, wondering when you’d have his—”

  “Never mind that, Rodrigo. I’ve something I need to think through,” and he was about to push past when Rodrigo asked him how his visit to Saint Petroc’s had gone.

  “Oh, well enough, although I think my talk with Dom Francisco proved far more helpful.”

  “The Dom was there?”

  “I bumped into him on my way out, but I really do need to—”

  “Ah. Before you do, Jusuf, that brings me to something I should have brought myself to tell you earlier.”

  “What?”

  Rodrigo drew Jusuf through into the forge and pulled out their chairs, placing them beside the damped-down hearth. “I want you to sit down,” he said.

  “Why?” and Jusuf warily removed his coat.

  “Just sit down, will you?” and so Jusuf did, looking up at Rodrigo in the half-light of the forge as he stood behind his chair, hands steadied on the top rail of its back. As Jusuf laid his coat across his lap, his once good friend cleared his throat.

  “The other day, I too met Dom Francisco. He mentioned he was returning to Santa Maria de Alcobaça at the end of March and wondered if I’d like to avail myself of an offer of free passage.”

  “Passage? The end of March? But that’ll be well before you expect the captain back…and before Gwenna has her birthing. Why so urgent?”

  “Because, with you now being dead and your plague-burden lost, there’s no longer any need to sail to Santander. And your master would expect such tidings of calamity be brought him directly.”

  “Directly?”

  “The Dom’s ship will be landing at Foy, so I can leave word for the captain at the Ship Inn of what we’ve agreed has happened and where I’ve gone. Then no one will be sent here looking for us when he does get back, thus avoiding their chance discovery that you’re still very much alive…and becoming something of a Bodmyn figure.”

  “A Bodmyn figure?”

  “I’ll be able to find onward passage to Ceuta from Nazaré, and at a pinch the captain can make his own way there without me, for just that one voyage. Although, how many of his crew he’ll find I’ve no idea. I imagine he’ll be doing the rounds of Foy’s taverns, looking for willing muster.”

  “If, Rodrigo. If he does get the Nao Providência back,” Jusuf quietly reminded him, his high spirits having long since plunged.

  The closeness there’d been between them may not have returned since Jusuf’s revelation about his burden, but there was still something there that Jusuf would sadly miss. But he could rightly see that the sooner they carried out their subterfuge, the surer would be the profit for himself and thereby for Gwenna and their child.

  “Very well,” Jusuf finally allowed, hardening his features.

  Rodrigo gazed at him for a moment, as though he’d words to say that were somehow the wrong shape to spill from his mouth, but then he looked down at his feet. “I’d… I’d best be off. I’ve things to do. And the end of March is still some way off.” His outline briefly filled the opening into the barn before the forge finally fell eerily silent.

  Jusuf stared at Rodrigo’s empty chair, thinking back to the last time they’d sat here together: the day Jusuf had destroyed their friendship. His gaze then wandered over the hearth and into the gloom beyond; the gloom where he’d seen his last vision of…of Kate.

  How had I known her name? he asked himself yet again.

  Then the insight he’d had at the spring brought him the answer, rushing in once more like waves crashing onto a rocky shore. And now he understood, understood his grandfather’s Songs of Our Forebears, and finally knew what he had to do. But would he still have enough kief left for it to work? Enough to carry his guidance down through the unfolding years.

  33 Of Unions: Found Again and Forged Anew

  The morning turned out wet and surprisingly cool. Rain laced against the bedroom window and lashed across the tin roof above Colin as he groggily poked his head out from beneath the bedcovers. Otherwise, everything seemed still and quiet within the chalet.

  “Kate?” he called out.

  “You awake at last? You want a cuppa?” she said, her voice raised and coming from the other side of the thin partition wall behind his head.

  “That’d be lovely. It’s raining!”

  “It’s supposed to clear by lunchtime, according to Radio Cornwall.”

  “Are their weather reports the same vintage as the music they play?”

  “Ha. Ha,” and the floor creaked as Kate clearly walked across the living room. “They probably just looked out of the window: I can see blue sky coming in.”

  “What do you want to do today, then?” Colin called as he prised himself from the bed, his back aching where a mattress spring must have poked it during the night.

  He opened the narrow bedroom door and found Kate, still leaning over the small table and peering through the rain-lashed window. “And don’t say go swimming in the sea.”

  She turned to him. “Hmm, that’s nice,” and she gave his nakedness a salacious smirk.

  “I don’t think I’ll be rising to any expectations you might have, my lovely, not in this cold.”

  “It’s not that cold, certainly not enough to make you such a…shrinking violet,” and she giggled.

  “Hey. Do you mind?”

  “It’s only the damp air that’s making it feel chill. And anyway, the sea’s the best place to be in the rain: you can’t get any wetter.”


  “You know, I reckon you really mean that.”

  “We often went swimming in the rain. It gives a great sense of impunity.”

  “Impunity, eh? I’m sure it does,” and Colin wandered past, out of Kate’s reach, and in to sort out some clothes from the small bedroom’s chest of drawers.

  As he dressed, the enormity of the previous evening’s phantasm rushed in on him. He froze, one leg through his underpants, and stared blindly through the chalet’s wall. Then he heard the kettle being filled and it snapped him back to the here-and-now.

  “We’ve got to find out where Jusuf’s plague-burden is,” he said to Kate as he finally stood, now fully dressed, in the galley doorway behind her. Kate finished spooning tea leaves into the pot, then turned to him, a serious face of her own.

  “Seeing we’re not going swimming, you up to doing another phantasm this morning?”

  “What? Dope before the sun’s over the yardarm? You are becoming bohemian.”

  “It’s the end of our first week, Colin: Friday, if you’ve lost track of time. We can’t afford to waste what we have left. And anyway, we’ll have to get some shopping done pretty soon; we’re down to our last quarter pint of milk, for one thing. If you do it this morning, it should be dry by the time we’ve got some more supplies in. Then we can get off somewhere to enjoy a walk maybe, or for a drink. Somewhere where we’ll be able to think through what more you might have learnt by then.”

  “Okay, but I need that tea first. Nothing worse than going to the fifteenth century without your first brew of the day.”

  A little later, and nicely stoned, Colin once more pushed a lit joss stick into the holder, a vaguely familiar metal object replacing the feel of the stick between his fingers. Those fingers, now large and dark-skinned, held a small and shallow bowl by its three legs. As Jusuf inspected its chamfered rim, though, he couldn’t help but bring to mind the previous day—when they’d finally said goodbye to Rodrigo.

  For now, though, he cast the memory out, returning his mind to the distraction of finishing off forging his own answer to his grandfather’s sebsi; the pipe Jusuf had learnt as a child had been so central to those Songs of Our Forebears. It had taken him a long time to think of what to use in place of his own sebsi, something more appropriate to this land devoid of kief. But he knew full well, for his idea to work, that it all depended on there one day being imbibers of the storyteller’s herb amongst his bloodline to come.

  “May God grant England its timely salvation of good kief from al-Maghrib,” he quietly prayed as he placed the bowl down on the bench and crossed himself. Then he noticed the groove around his finger, where his ring had been.

  “You’d better not forget to take this with you,” he remembered saying to Rodrigo as the man had stood before him, his bulging bag at his feet. The bright light of a promising spring day, framed by the barn doorway behind Rodrigo, had unfortunately made his features hard to read. But his rounded shoulders had given Jusuf some kernel of hope. He’d then slipped his arm around his newlywed wife’s burgeoning waist. His hand had rested upon their soon-to-be-born child as, in the palm of his other, he’d offered Rodrigo the broken ring.

  “Couldn’t you get it off any other way?” Rodrigo had asked after Jusuf had tipped it into his hand.

  “I didn’t try. You wouldn’t have bothered keeping it whole if you’d been removing it from my corpse, so it would have looked a bit suspicious otherwise.”

  “True.”

  “And anyway, it’s hardly likely I’ll ever see it again.”

  “No. No, I don’t suppose it is.”

  Gwenna slipped her arm around Jusuf’s waist, a single squeeze bringing him much needed comfort.

  “Before I go, though…” Rodrigo began but then lowered his gaze to Jusuf’s feet. “I think it only right to tell you that I’ve finally come to see that you had…had no other choice.” He snapped his gaze back to Jusuf’s face then glanced at Gwenna. “I think what I’m trying to say is that at last I understand.” He took a step nearer Jusuf. “I’m sure I’d have done the same, had the tables been turned. I honestly don’t want to part company with any bad feeling between us. Not leave such a sour taste as my parting gift, not after all we’ve both been through, my…my friend,” He’d then reached out his hand to Jusuf.

  Those final two simple words seared painfully raw through Jusuf’s mind, rawer still at the memory of the embrace they’d all three then fallen to, each clinging tightly to the other. Jusuf choked back a wetness about his eyes and reached out to his work once more, still waiting there on the bench.

  Absently, he turned it around, hoping the hurt of his loss would somehow hide behind his new creation’s pleasing form. He would need a clear head soon, he reminded himself, hardly promised by dwelling on such regret.

  But he couldn’t help remembering Rodrigo’s departure, the words he’d cast their way as he’d walked out of the smithy for the very last time: “Maybe one day, my friends, I will darken your door once more; come and see you and your babe,” then he’d waved behind him as he’s stridden off down the road.

  Jusuf and Gwenna had silently lingered outside the smithy, gazing after his diminishing figure, seeing him briefly glance back the once before vanishing into the distance.

  Reaching across the bench, Jusuf took down a small pot from a shelf above, its muslin cover speared by a splint of wood. This he placed beside the shallow, three-legged bowl. From beneath a clean rag at the back of the bench he then slipped out a taller, round bowl, about the size of a large apple. Its curved sides were peppered with holes, it broad opening, like its partner’s, boasting a chamfered rim. This he set down on the other side of the small pot, from which he removed the muslin cover.

  Clearing his mind of everything else, he scraped out a blob of the pot’s greasy yellow flux with the end of the splint. Slowly and carefully, applying it repeatedly to the chamfered rim of each bowl, he gave them both an even layer that glistened in the spring light coming in through the open barn doors.

  After a while, and one last close peer at his handiwork, Jusuf finally stuck the splint back into the pot of flux, covered its opening with the muslin and placed it back on the shelf. Stepping back, he held his breath as he stared at the two metal pieces. Beseeching his new god, he willed each to submit to this: the greatest demand he’d ever had on his smithying skills.

  He carried them both into the forge, placing them down beside the hotly glowing hearth. Beside it lay a small hammer, and on a chair before it a large leather funnel—what the English here called a tun-dish—and a fold of cotton cloth. From the cloth Jusuf removed his last saved lump of kief.

  About the size of the end of his thumb, he carefully placed it at the centre of the shallow bowl, then upended the taller one and slowly lowered it, until their rims perfectly mated. A few taps with the hammer and a shiny yellow line oozed out from around the join. Jusuf stepped back and once again held his breath, until letting out a long and heavy sigh.

  “May Allah and my new Christian God take me back to my childhood years with open ears,” he intoned, staring up through the dark-hidden roof of the forge, “that I may truly remember my grandfather’s time-honoured song.” And with that, he reached for the arm of the bellows and began pumping air into the hearth’s close-pressed charcoal, gently humming as he watched it grow brighter and whiter.

  Snatches of words and some of a tune crept into his mind, the wavering voice of his aged grandfather seeming to guide his own faltering song. He tried hard not to force the memory, to let it take a hold in its own good time, to lay himself open to being filled with the ghost of his forebear.

  On he pumped and the charcoal burned ever brighter, sending up flickering sparks into the gloom beyond its eventually blinding glow. What his childhood ears had once heard as a wailing dirge on an old man’s quivering lips now steadily settled to a harmony, to a weaving of tone and shape and finally words that formed a long skein of his bloodline’s path through time. A skein th
at stretched out from those who’d long gone before him to the ones yet to be born into its far off future.

  Half-blinded by the glare of the hot coals, Jusuf let go of the bellows and groped beside the hearth for his tongs, finally grasping them in a hand that no longer seemed his own. But then the tongs were about the conjoined pieces, carefully lifting them as one by their lower half before gently settling them into their nest of bright-white fire.

  Jusuf again took to the arm of the bellows as the legs of his creation slowly glowed red, then brilliant white as their bloody colour rose into the body of metal above. So fixed was he on the particulars of what colour had reached where, and how evenly the fizzling union ran, that for a moment he almost overlooked the leather tun-dish.

  Quickly, he snatched it up, barely breaking from his pumping as his voice carried aloft a plaintive song that quickly engulfed him, that soon rose higher and sweeter and more compelling. The metal glowed white-hot throughout, the kief within hissing and spitting and bubbling. Its smoke issued in long blue tendrils through the host of holes, rising like escaping snakes.

  Now was the time, Jusuf knew. Now!

  He swung the tun-dish above his creation, as near as he dared to its sizzling sound and now billowing smoke. Then he fixed his lips about the funnel’s spout. Tensing at the prospect but gathering his resolve, he drew in a long, deep lungful of hot choking smoke, holding it for as long as he could bear.

  In an almighty rush, like the crashing of some celestial choir, his mind soared high above him, drawing with it his very own Songs of Our Forebears. And higher and higher they went, each deep draught of smoke searing out into his flying words. Its refrain possessed him, sweetened his voice yet more and lifted his song, reaching ahead through the rushing blackness of time. Onwards he sang, ever onwards, towards the distant pull of a familiar and welcoming bright white light: the light of his and all this world’s last hope of their many bloodlines’ future salvation.