Fire Watch

THE FATHER OF THE BRIDE

I should be happy. Everyone tells me so: my wife, my daughter, my brave new son-in-law. This is the happily ever after for which we have waited all these long years. But I fear we have waited far too long, and now it is too late to be happy.

My wife tries to jolly me out of this dark mood. “The roads are better,” she says. “There is a new bridge at the ford.”

“The better for armies to pass along, burning and killing,” I answer. There are English already in Crecy; a story I would not believe at first, and they are carrying weapons I never heard of—a bow as tall as a man, a ribaud that spits black smoke and sudden death.

“You never liked the forest at our gates,” she says. “Or the wolves.”

“Nor do I like the town. And there are still wolves at our gates,” I say. “Merchants and pedlars.”

“They bring you the cinnamon and pepper for your food.”

“That give me the bellyache.”

“And medicines for the bellyache,” she says, smiling to herself. She is embroidering on a piece of linen. Do women still do that, sitting with their heads bent forward over their work, pulling the fine stitches taut with their white hands? I do not think so. Embroidered cloth can be bought by the length in the town, I suppose. What cannot be bought in that town? Beauty, perhaps. Repose. I have seen nothing of either in this new world.

“This is a beautiful coat,” said the insolent tailor they sent me to. Nothing would do but that I have a new coat for the wedding. The tailor shouted in my ear through all the fitting and did not once call me “my lord.” “A beautiful coat. Brocade. From the east.”

“Gaudy you mean,” I said, but he did not hear me. How could he? The water mill runs night and day, sawing the forest into shops, houses, bridges. Soon the whole world will be town. “The coat is too short,” I shouted at him. It showed what God intended decent men to hide.

“You are old-fashioned,” he said. “Turn around.”

The coat is too short. I am cold all the time. “Where are the servants?” I say to my wife. “I want a fire.”

She looks up from her sewing as if she knows the answer will grieve me. “Gone,” she says. “We are getting new ones from the town.”

“Gone? Where?” I say, but I know already. Hardly awake, the cooks have run off to be bakers; the chamberlains, burghers; the pages, soldiers. “I shall catch my death of cold in this coat.”

“The pedlars have medicines for chills,” she says, and looks sideways at me to make me smile.

“It is all so changed,” I say, frowning instead. “There is nothing about this world that I like.”

“Our daughter has a husband and a kingdom,” she says. “She did not prick her finger on a spindle and die that terrible day.”

“No,” I say, and have to smile after all. She is so beautiful, so happy with her prince. She would not have minded sleeping a thousand years so long as he kissed her awake. She thinks the forest parted when he rode to find her, and I do not tell her it was not she he came to find, but land for his fields, land for his new town, land to clear and settle and tax. He was as surprised as any of his woodsmen to find us drowsing here. But he seems to love her, and there is no denying he is a brave young man. He moves through this strange time as if it held no terrors. Perhaps the forest does part for him. Or perhaps he has only chopped it down.

Only a little of the forest remains to the east, and even it is not so dark as before, so full of guarding briars. I went into it one day, looking, or so I said to myself, for the good fairy who saved my daughter, though she had never lived in that part of the forest. I found myself instead near the tower of the old fairy, who by her spite brought us all to this pass.

“I have come to ask a question,” I shouted into the silence of the trees. “Why did you hate us so? What had we done to you that you should have come to our christening bearing curses?” There was no answer. “Had you outlived your time so that you hated all things new, even my infant daughter?” Silence. “Do you hate us still?”

In the answering silence I thought I could hear the town, builders and rumbling wheels. As I came nearer, I saw that the tower had been knocked down, the stones heaped into piles and carted away. I followed the tracks of the wheels and came to a sunny clearing and to men in a holy habit I did not recognize. They told me they are Cistercians (are there new saints as well? Is everything new?) and that they are using the stones to build a church.

“Are you not afraid of the fairy who lived in this tower?” I asked them.

“Old man,” said one of them, clapping his hand to my shoulder, “there are no fairies. Only God and his angels.”

So I came away with the answer to my questions after all. We have outlived our old enemy, and the only curse upon us is the cruel spell of time.

“We have lived through the worst of our days,” my wife says, trying to comfort me.

“I hope so,” I say, looking out the window of my castle onto the town, the fields beyond, the sea, onto a world without forests or wolves or fairies, a world with who knows what terrors to replace them? “I hope so.”

“There is not a spinning wheel in all the kingdom,” she says tearfully “Not even in the town.” She has pricked her finger on her embroidery. There are drops of blood on the linen. “I have not seen a single spinning wheel.”

“Of course not,” I say, and pat her shoulder.

There is at least no danger from that direction. What need have we of spinning wheels when every ship brings velvets, silks, cloth of gold? And perhaps other cargoes, not so welcome. English soldiers from the west. And from the east, tales of a black spell that kills men where they stand and moves like a curse toward France. Perhaps the old fairy is not dead after all but only biding her time in some darker forest to the east.

I have dozed off. My wife comes to wake me for yet another feast. I grumble and turn on my side. “You’re tired,” she says kindly “Go back to sleep.”

Would that I could.