I left the office that day feeling like a hound let off the leash, permitted at last to give chase.
In the years that followed, there was nothing but the hunt. I ignored the papers and wireless speeches and my father’s pamphlets. I ignored everything—save you.
You led me into archives and private collections, libraries and museums, ancient ruins and family vaults. I excelled at the chase—I had a better-than-average memory and an eye for detail, and a mind that clicked obediently along like a series of bright brass gears. But it was like hunting in a hall ofmirrors; I caught glimpses of bright armor or pale hair, but when I reached out, I touched nothing but glass.
I read and re-read every accounting of your story—Lazamon’s shambling anthology of legends, Marie de Meulan’s romantic verses, Montmer’sHistorica—but all of them were third- or fourth-hand, history watered down into mere hearsay. Most of the authors claimed to have based their versions onThe Death of Una Everlasting—a true accounting of your adventures as written by an anonymous traveling companion—but, as there was no evidence that such a text had ever existed, most modern historians saw this as a bid for legitimacy rather than a fact.
My undergraduate work was therefore little more than an echo’s echo. My papers were all reinterpretations of reinterpretations, dissections of lines that had already been dissected a hundred times before. It was received well enough—I graduated with the second-highest marks in the history of the department, after Sawbridge herself, and my article on the grail as a metonym for nationhood had been quoted in theTimes—but Professor Sawbridge was not fooled. (“You are clever enough to convince the swine that you are giving them pearls,” she observed, idly. “Alas, alack! I am not a pig.”)
My current manuscript—An Everlasting Legacy: A Survey of Modern Translations—was supposed to earn me the Middle Dominion Faculty Fellow title, the respect of my peers, and a living wage. But it was so anemic and derivative that even the swine (the other faculty) were beginning to entertain doubts. They muttered often about the benefits of fresh air, and more than once I’d heard the wordsextended leavefloating ghoulishly down the hall. Though I had nowhere else to go—I wasn’t even sure I could crawl back home, after the things my father and I had said to one another during our last fight—I was on the verge of agreeing with them.
Until I received that book in the post, and you saved me for the fourth time.
3
I BARELY TOUCHEDthe book, that first day.
I simply crouched in my flat above the butcher shop and smoked an entire pack of Lucky Stars, lighting each cigarette from the butt of the last. It was a habit I’d picked up during the war and continued on doctor’s orders for my weak disposition, and also because it was the only way to overpower the meaty, battlefield smell of the butcher shop below.
I moved the book from my bedside to the desk and back again. I performed a series of tests—not on the book, but on myself: writing out my whereabouts for the last three days to ensure there were no odd gaps, reciting every monarch of Dominion from Yvanne up to the republic, pinching myself quite hard, et cetera. I had suffered some little disturbances after the war—forgetting things that had happened only the day before, or remembering things which had never happened, or confusing dreams for memories—but my mind seemed to be in perfect order now.
I went to bed early and lay tense and unsleeping for several hours.
At two or three in the morning I said, aloud, “God, enough,” slipped on a pair of cotton gloves, and opened the book. I translated the first sentence:
It begins where it ends: beneath the yew tree.
A surprising peace moved through me as I wrote the words, an almost mechanical satisfaction, as of a key turning smoothly in a lock. I returned to bed and slept well. I dreamed, and my dreams were all of you.
The second and third days I spent examining the book as an archaeological object, striving for some semblance of objectivity.
It was not at all uncommon for unscrupulous or excitable persons to “discover” artifacts related to Una Everlasting. Every old tree in every old village was the one from which you first pulled Valiance; every rusted shield was the one you wore on your left arm, a white dragon upon a red field. Just last week Professor Sawbridge had been called away to investigate a vault beneath the ruins of Cavallon Keep, which might have been your final resting place.
I extracted tiny samples of ink and studied the grain of the wood beneath my strongest magnifying glass. I took meticulous, if inconclusive, notes.Ink is oak gall, hand-lettered—rate of decay indicates early period. Pages are wood pulp. Parchment or vellum would have been more typical.
On the fourth day I opened the book again and worked through the first six pages, and forgot all my fussy, doubtful notes. Yes, the paper was anachronistic. Yes, the binding was unusual, perhaps even unique. But the words themselves rang in my head like church bells, and I came to believe that whoever had written them had truly known you, not only as a hero or a saint, but as a living woman.
It was the way he described you, the casual familiarity of it, and the way he sometimes forgot the grander quest in favor of odd, quiet moments of intimacy. But most of all it was the way he mourned you. Grief rose from every page like turpentine, burning the back of my throat.
On the fifth day I made copies of my translated pages and mailed them to Professor Sawbridge, who was still away supervising the excavation of the burial vault.
On the sixth day Professor Sawbridge and I exchanged a series of telegrams, in which she called me a rude name, committed light treason, and cast aspersions on the veracity of the text. I knew she was at least intrigued, however, because she was taking the early train back to campus, and the only thing she hated more than her country was getting out of bed before ten o’clock.
On the seventh day, I went out for cigarettes and milk. The sun was far too hot and the air was far too fresh, moving around me in great unsettling billows, tugging at my sleeves.
When I returned, with relief, to the stale dark of my flat, the book was gone.
In its place there was a crisp white card, bearing no name, but only an address.
I had never flourished in a crisis. I was one of God’s natural ditherers, much given to the wringing of hands and the writing of unhelpful lists. Since the war, I had added fits of weeping and melancholic stupors, and every now and then a wave of confused and violent memory that left me curled in a corner, shaking.
I did not dither now, though, nor wring my hands. I did compose a briefand unhelpful list (1. Report the theft of a nonexistent book to the police; 2. Search the room for clues, as they are always doing in novels; 3. Weeping fit??), but I did not even bother to write it down. My body was already moving, as if it had decided on a course of action without me.
I donned my old red service coat, then—after a moment’s sweaty uncertainty—removed the coat, strapped my holstered Sinclair service revolver over my shoulder, and slipped the coat back over it. I tucked two packs of cigarettes into the breast pocket and left the flat with the white card clutched so tightly in my hand that the edges cut into my palm.
I showed the card to the cab driver, who read the address twice, gave me a suspicious, flinty look, then drove in silence to the very heart of Cavallon and deposited me on the steps of a building I’d never seen, but recognized nonetheless, because it was stamped on the back of every coin in the country: the capitol.
I exited the cab clumsily, blinded by the sheer volume of white marble. The air was thick and hot, as if it had been panted from a dog’s mouth; I couldn’t imagine, suddenly, why I’d worn my service jacket.
