The Watchtower (27 page)

"The forest of Broceliande? Okay, here's something I don't get. If you already knew that Morgane was trapped in a lake in the forest of Broceliande, and you know that Broceliande is the modern-day Paimpont, then why couldn't you just go to Paimpont, find the lake, and ask Morgane to make you mortal? Why did you need me? And why did I have to sit in a church in Paris for a week and then go to Fontainebleau and Lusignan?"

"The mythical forest of Broceliande is not a place of this world. It can't be found on a map of France. You can't reach it on the E50"--she gestured with several hands to the blur of highway outside the car windows--"or take a TGV from Montparnesse and expect to find the door open to Broceliande. You could wander for days--for months,
years
even--in the forest of modern-day Paimpont and never find the pool where Morgane dwells. When Melusine and Marguerite imprisoned her there, they set spells to guard the approach so only a very few--those vetted by the fey--could find the pool. Even though you have gone through the steps and been sent on by Jean Robin, Sylvianne, Hellequin, and Melusine, you still have no guarantee that you'll find your way to the pool. The final test will be in the Val sans Retour ... and it won't be an easy one. And, as the name implies, there won't be any second chances. Either we'll find the pool tomorrow or we'll remain in the Valley of No Return forever."

* * *

After that dire pronouncement there didn't seem to be much more to say. We both lapsed into silence, Octavia intent on driving fast while I stared out the window at flat fields and turreted towns in the distance. I got the best sense of where we were from the large decorative billboards of each town--a cathedral for Chartres, a portrait of Proust complete with tea and madeleines for Illiers-Combray, bicyclists for Tours. Eventually I drifted off to sleep. When I awoke, we'd left the highway and were on a narrow country road bordered by towering trees. We passed rough stone cottages with brightly painted red or blue doors and delicate lace curtains in the windows.

I yawned and looked over at Octavia. "Are we there?"

For answer she pointed to a sign painted on the side of a gas station. A lascivious, doe-eyed fairy in skimpy dress sat on a toadstool beneath the words
BIENVENU A LE PAYS DE LA FEE MORGANE.
I'd been surprised by the lack of tourism surrounding Melusine's old home, but there didn't appear to be any lack here in Morgane's old stomping ground. We passed a camping ground decorated with tin cutouts of fairies, dragons, and wizards. The campers themselves were wearing long dresses and floppy shirts. It looked like a Woodstock reunion. A sign advertising a
FETE MEDIEVALE
explained the archaic dress. This must be a French version of the Renaissance Faires popular in America. When we pulled up to the Relais de Broceliande, a half-timbered lodge sitting above a walled town, abbey, and lake, the parking lot was full of painted minivans and VW Beetles circa 1968.

"Is there something going on here this weekend?" I asked.

Octavia shrugged as she pulled a cloak over her shoulders. "There's always some sort of festival or fair going on here. The young people are quite enamored of fairies and Arthurian legend. I often wonder what Arthur and Guinevere would make of it all."

Before I could ask if she'd actually known Arthur and Guinevere, Octavia was out of the car and striding briskly up the ramp to the hotel, pulling a Louis Vuitton valise behind her. By the time I had wrestled my battered duffel out of the trunk, she was already at the front desk signing us in. As she handed her credit card to the clerk, I noticed how tired she looked--and how
dry
. Of course, I realized, she hadn't had a chance to hydrate since we'd left Paris. My guess was confirmed when I heard her ask if there was a tub in her room.

"I'll need to ... rest for a while if we're to attempt the forest tomorrow," she said as we followed the bellboy up to our separate rooms. "Do you mind if I leave you on your own for the rest of the evening?"

"Not at all, Octavia. Is there anything I can get for you? Some ... bottled water?"

"Yes, that's a good idea. If you wouldn't mind having room service send up two dozen oysters and three liters of Perrier and telling them just to leave the tray in the room. Thank you, my dear." She touched my hand and I was alarmed to feel how dry and papery her skin felt.

"I'll do that," I said. "Would you like me to stay with you?"

"No, dear. It's best that I'm alone. I need to focus all my reserves."

I had the restaurant send up the oysters and water and waited outside the room to make sure the waiter left the tray without disturbing Octavia in her bath. I could hear the splash of water from behind the closed door and could only hope that she was all right.

Seeing those oysters made me hungry myself, so after a quick stop in my room I went down to the hotel restaurant, which was on a terrace overlooking the old abbey and lake. Quite a few seafood offerings were on the menu even though we were miles from the sea. I supposed that even in the landlocked section of Brittany the sea wasn't so very far. Even here, something in the soft lambent light, shading toward evening, the lush wild roses on the side of the road, and the rough stone cottages spoke of the sea.

I ordered a bottle of the local Breton apple cider and the Moules Frites Mariniers, which arrived in a bath of bright saffron yellow broth, and ate them, scooping the flesh out with one of the pointed shells, looking out on the lake--the Etang de Paimpont, as the guidebook called it, the pool of Paimpont. The water was pink where the setting sun was reflected, but dark closer to the shore where dense forest cast its shadow. Perhaps it was the effect of my second tankard of the deceptively strong cider, but as the sun sank behind the tops of the trees across the lake and their shadows lengthened, I had an impression that the woods on the opposite shore were creeping toward me. Consulting the local map on the place mat, I saw that the Val sans Retour was part of those woods. So this lake might well be the pool where Morgane was trapped--at least its earthly equivalent. I wasn't entirely sure I understood what Octavia meant about the forest and the pool not being
of this world,
but as the water darkened from pink to red to violet, I could almost imagine that the thin membrane that separated the worlds was stretched taut over the surface of the lake and that it might at any moment break ...

Then a loud group of British soccer players descended on the restaurant, a radio from the nearby campground drifted across the water, and with a mingled sensation of relief and regret, I was very much in
this
world again.

I paid my bill and then, because my nerves felt too on edge to go back to my empty and unfamiliar hotel room, walked across the street toward the abbey. The path was quiet, most of the tourists only now having dinner. I had the abbey to myself save for a lone worshipper sitting in the back of the church, who muttered her prayers, with bowed and deeply shawled head. I walked up the center of the nave, hoping the sound of my footsteps wouldn't disturb his or her meditation. The space was so vast and bare that my footsteps echoed as if from the bottom of a well. Looking up, though, I thought I was at the bottom of the sea. From the thirteenth-century Romanesque style of the church I was expecting a plain stone, rounded vault, but what I found instead was a wooden roof lined with thin, interlocking strips of wood springing out from a center seam so that it looked like the hull of a boat. It
was
the hull of a boat, I realized after staring at it for several minutes, the overturned hull of a massive, ancient ship.

"Let the dove, or the fish, or the vessel flying before the wind be our signets."

Startled at the voice, I jerked my head down so quickly that I made myself dizzy. The long, narrow, dark shape before me spun like an arrow on a compass and then settled into the figure of a black-robed priest, with a grizzled but kindly face and an Irish accent.

"I noticed you were surprised by our ceiling. Our founding fathers often used ships to represent the church, but only a few went so far as to craft their church
from
a ship. Local legend has it that this was the original ship that brought the seven founder saints from Wales to these shores, but," he said, winking, "some of my more unorthodox and fanciful parishioners believe that this is one of the ships that sailed from Ys when that benighted island was drowned."

"And what do you believe?" I asked before considering what a rude question that was to ask a man of God.

But the priest only laughed. "I believe the people who built this church were grateful for safe harbor in a storm and built it to give thanks to God--whatever name they gave their God." He smiled and lifted pale blue eyes to the curved hull of the ceiling. "And I have always thanked God for the shelter of his ship and prayed to be steered on my way by a beneficent wind."

"That's a good prayer," I agreed, returning the priest's smile and thinking of those ominous shadows stealing across the lake outside. "I'll remember it."

The old priest bowed his head and made the sign of the cross in the air between us. Then he turned and made his way back down the long nave, his own otsteps curiously quiet on the stone floor. Perhaps he went barefoot, I thought, as he turned in the single ray of evening light coming through the stained-glass window at the back of the church. For a moment his face shone red-gold--the same color as the Breton cider I'd drunk earlier. Then, as he turned away, his black cloak merged with the shadows and he vanished.

I took a step forward, a cry rising in my throat, but stopped when I felt a breeze waft against my face. What had the priest prayed for? To be steered by a beneficent wind? I turned in the direction of the breeze until I was facing a side chapel. The small niche was dominated by a raised sarcophagus upon which lay an effigy carved out of black stone. Moving closer, I saw that the figure was of a medieval knight laid out in all his armor. I'd seen dozens like it at the Cloisters--armored knights sleeping for eternity equipped with sword and mace, often at their feet a loyal dog or crouching lion. The feet of this knight, though, lay on the bent neck and broken wing of a dying swan. Dying because an arrow had been shot through her heart. I let my eye travel upward from the swan's long neck to the knight's face. There, carved in blackest stone some seven hundred years ago, lay the familiar face of Will Hughes.

21

Love in the Woods

Madame La Pieuvre had proven to be a spectacularly different sort of person, Will reflected with some bitterness, a few days after his interview with her. But the results of her guidance had been exactly the same as with all the other "signs" he had tried to follow to Marguerite.

He was sitting on a boulder in the dense woods adjacent to the gardens at Fontainebleau and felt as bleak as he had in his most discouraged moments in Paris. Madame La Pieuvre had been part octopus and had numerous arms to prove it, she was as witty and charming as anyone he'd ever met, and she had a flotilla of servants in her enormous mansion to serve him an exceptional dinner and a variety of gorgeously colored drinks, all of which he'd never heard of or tasted before. Madame La Pieuvre had freely told him that she had heard from Marguerite recently, that Marguerite was in Fontainebleau, and that she would love for a man named Will Hughes to come there and see her; hopefully Madame might run across Will in Paris and tell him! All Madame asked in return for this priceless information was a bit of advice from Will on investing, upon learning of his own interest in the nascent stock markets of England and France.

But, having scoured Fontainebleau from end to end now, from the chateau's most beautiful corner to the forest's thickest bramble, from the most intricate walk in the garden to the finest gleam on the chateau's sloping roof, from the most obscure window to the noon-splashed depths of the pond in the woods, he'd found no sign of Marguerite. And he was prepared to admit to himself that Jean Robin, church steps' note, and all else notwithstanding he might be no closer to Marguerite now than he was in their most painful days of separation back in London.

Will could not gain entrance through any of the chateau's heavily guarded doors, for this was one of Henry IV's most zealously secured residences. Will could have been impaled for giving a guard the wrong look. But he'd managed, climbing thick-foliaged trees that afforded concealment on a moonlit night, to lok fruitlessly into quite a number of the chateau's rooms. No one.

Marguerite must have known, when she chose to summon Will here through Madame La Pieuvre, of the obstacles to entry. She'd had ample opportunities to leave him a new sign and had left him none. If she had
seriously
summoned him here ... for his most excruciating thought now was that she hadn't summoned in any benign way, that she merely toyed with him like wind with a leaf, a dark wind of lingering anger over their last fight, a wind that she lashed out at him with. Marguerite's inaccessibility, her invisibility, her absence, seemed to suggest one thing: as in Paris, the purpose of offering hope was to torment him. Will was being tortured to death by his own love!

On the second day he purchased a spyglass in a nearby town and concealed himself in a bramble in the woods to avoid the suspicion of capital espionage. Then he relentlessly scanned all the chateau's windows day and night, hoping for the merest glimpse of that ineffable face, her glide past a window in profile or shadow. A look directly at him was by now his wildest ambition. Indeed he would have settled for the sight of her in rapt conversation with an attentive courtier--with a prince--settled for their rapturous kiss!--rather than this void. He could not settle for what he did get out of all his desperate scrutiny: nothing.

On this third day at Fontainebleau, Will was sitting on a rock he had come to regard as his friend, on the edge of tears, staring into a stand of poplar trees across a rough path on a gray, wind-split afternoon. It hadn't taken much for Will to convince himself that the rock was his friend. Wasn't it composed of atoms just as he was? They had that in common. People used the term
flesh and blood
to refer to their family members. But atoms were an even more intimate bond, as they
made up
flesh and blood. Look at the lifestyle and mentality of his friend the rock. Much to admire there. He/she was self-sufficient, no disastrous entanglements for the heart and mind, even if it had such organs. It certainly didn't travel wildly from place to place in pursuit of disingenuous and possibly malevolent signs; it didn't travel at all. The rock was a soul mate. Will would sit here right now and soak up the gray air, and the breeze with its hint of rain, alongside the rock. The rock was quiet, but at least now Will needn't feel so all alone.