No one knows how long he walked for this time. But he woke on his back looking into a blue sky through the protective fronds of green bracken. They towered above him, smelling of childhood and home, and he lay for a while trying to remember where he was, and why. But that was quite beyond him. He sat up then, and looked at the scratches and bruises on his arms and hands and his knees where the cloth of his trousers had ripped away, and at the thick stems of the bracken like a small forest around him. Some of the fronds were still uncurling, little bunched-up fists, like a baby’s hand tight round an adult finger, like green soldiers ready to fight.
Itron Varia da Borz Wenn
A ra soudarded deus radenn
That was all he knew of the song, all that anyone knew perhaps, though he’d asked for it long and hard around his native village. She was supposed to have saved us by turning every single stem of bracken into a soldier and terrifying the living daylights out of the bloody English, massed in their ships and ready to pounce out beyond the Sept Îles. What an army that must have been. Hundreds of them gathered around him now, though they seemed to have come in peace this time. He tried getting to his feet. Even then the bracken reached his waist. He looked for the track he should have made last night, as a partial memory came back to him of crashing and tearing for hours through the leaves and the brambles before falling over once too often and failing to get back up. It was very strange, he thought, that there should be no trace at all of how he got there. Nothing broken. Nothing flattened. Nothing torn.
But he could feel the sea not far away now, and knew what he had to do: head for the higher ground, where granite boulders pushed above the army of fronds like fortresses. Something in the colour of the rock made his heart leap, but he kept his mind very deliberately, very methodically, on the task of getting the tight mass of soldiers to yield a path. He had lost his hazel walking stick somewhere on this stupid journey, and there was nothing in sight with which to replace it. Itron Varia da Borz Gwenn / A ra soudarded deus radenn. Come on, paotred, he said, let me through, I’m on your side.
Climbing the steps up from the beach he knew he was a strange sight. They were used to seeing him arrive at odd times, weary and little dusty perhaps from the roads, but not like this, tramp-ragged, worn out, cut, bruised and in pain. In his left hand, instead of the straight hazel, he still clutched, unthinking, a twisted bit of oak torn off a fallen tree he’d clambered over, half-buried under the bracken, and used to beat a way through. It would sit on his desk for years, and help him write. He could see a face, he said, in one of the knots; he called it Skolan, as a private joke. It was not, he came to realise, a comforting or a happy face, but by the time he came to write the angry postscript to the Book there was, in any case, precious little comfort or happiness to be had. His boy would spend his childhood afraid of it, but would take it for luck, bad luck as it turned out, into the Great War.
He kept his hat pulled down, as if afraid to be recognised, but it was more from fatigue than anything because he knew that any recognition now, after so long amongst strangers, would only make him glad. God, he hoped that she would be there, at home, on her own, and he took the little steps quickly in spite of the pain in his feet, passing the workers in the lower cottages with barely a nod. Up past the sail-menders, past the crab and lobster pots, and now he could see the house on the rise, foursquare, elegant, framed by the curving dark pine. And he was just passing the tiny dark cottage of the seamstress, Lise Bellec, when he heard her thin voice float out above the sound of his own laboured breath. Itron Varia, she sang,
Itron Varia da Borz Gwenn
A ra soudarded deus radenn
She did indeed, he thought, and then, that’s not the right tune. He slowed in spite of himself and held his breath as another couplet floated out. A new one. He stopped altogether. And another.
She knows it! Twenty years I’ve been asking and she knows it!
He hesitated then. He wanted to knock and stoop and enter where he had been so many times before and claim this prize, this reward for his endurance at his journey’s end. But then it wasn’t quite his journey’s end and he was hoping, had been hoping all along, for a different reward, and he was superstitious enough, soap and clean linen notwithstanding, to feel that two rewards, two endings, would really be pushing his luck, and that, as far he knew, he really had no more luck left to push. So he carries on, with the new tune already in his head, up through the village to the old schoolmaster’s house, their house, where, this time, he will find her alone and contented, just coming in from the garden with a basket full of peas.