My wandering monk returned today.
He found me brooding in the apple orchard where I sat hoping, without really believing, that the meager sun of this green island would bake some of the pain from my crooked bones.
“You are troubled, Brother Kai,” he said, in his bluff, booming voice.
“Memory,” I said, making room for his broad frame on my stone bench. “An old man’s last and bitterest companion.”
“And what brought on these memories that so darken your brow on one of the finest days God ever wrought?” There was a twinkle in his eye as he said it, letting me know he was attempting to goad me into better humor.
“The market has been here this past week. Some of the brothers helped walk me around it. Not that I have anything to exchange for goods, but they thought to give the old man a change of scenery, and some of the younger brothers find me an amusing and slightly dangerous companion.” I am sure I smiled then, but my monk is not to be easily shocked, nor is he the sort to scold. These are attributes that make him an easy companion. “There were all manner of mountebanks and tricksters there, as there are at such gatherings, but there was a harper too. Perhaps the man was a true bard in the old style, I do not know. But as the brothers brought me forward to listen, the harper turned to a lay of Tristan and Iseult. It seemed as if he knew me and had been waiting for me to come.” I am a distinctive figure, prodigiously lame as I am, and such men may be paid well in advance for their songs. After all these long years, the fate of Iseult on Britain’s shores still rankles with the men of Eire, and she still has kindred here.
“And did you speak to him?”
I turned my face away. I did as I have done. I lost my temper. I demanded to know what pig had taught the man to sing. I mocked his voice and manner until the crowd roared with laughter, and the man sat there, watching me, and he took my mocking with a calm that would not be shattered. It is a poor thing to make such a spectacle of oneself, and I was not ready to confess to it.
The monk took my silence as answer enough.
“Did you know them?” he asked after awhile.
“Sir Tristan I knew, a little, the short time he was knight at the Round Table. A bold youth. A warrior to make his enemies quake in their saddles. Queen Iseult I never knew at all.”
“Is it as men say now, that there was a potion of love drunk between them?”
I laughed a little at this. Let it loose into the world, and how much a history may change! Were there any left on either shore who had not heard this version of the tragedy? Sir Tristan came to Ireland to defeat an Irish king and fell head over heels in love with that same king’s wise daughter. But — oh, fell fate! — he must deliver her up to his own lord, King Mark who demands her hand to make the peace and to spite Sir Tristan, of whom he has grown jealous.
The stories diverge after that. Here in the land of Eire one will hear that Sir Tristan arranged for Queen Iseult to be kidnapped so that he might effect her rescue and take advantage of her. On the Briton’s strand, you hear that as the lovers cross the ocean, they accidentally drink a potion given to a servant by Iseult’s kin and, by its power fall into an unbreakable passion one with the other. So strong is this passion that when Tristan believed Iseult had died, he died of a broken heart, and Iseult succumbed herself to the same malady when she saw Tristan in his tomb.
“It makes a fine story does it not?” I answered tartly. “The potion absolves the pretty pair from having to think what they’re doing. He was a liege man of the high king and she was married of an embattled king, and childless to boot. Oh, yes, a pretty story.”
He cocked his head toward me. “Do you know it to be untrue then? I thought you had never known the queen?”
“Her I did not know, but I knew one who did. A girl sent to Tintagel for fostering. Lynet was her name, and she, to her sorrow, knew far too intimately what befell Tristan and Iseult.” Memories, too many of them too old and too bitter came to me. “It is a hard thing to be caught up in the stories of the great,” I said.
He looked at me keenly. “As it is to be brother to a hero?”
“Just so.” I think he knew how close to my heart he struck, but my monk is not one to apologize the wounds his honesty brings.
“Well.” He stood, taking up his staff. “It would seem to me that to exorcise this bitterness of yours, you must draw out that memory with the balm of ink and paper.”
And so I shall. Herewith I set it down. Not the tale of Sir Tristan and Queen Iseult, of which I was, by God’s mercy, spared the witness of, but of Lynet of Cambryn who was far less fortunate than I. Let this tale stand as what the true nature of love is, and how the brave soul carries itself in the face of the worst that may come.
Let me begin.
Kai pen Hir ap Cynyr
At the Monastery of Gillean,
Eire