Chapter The Everlasting
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