On the world of Kerwen the children's blood is mended only by a cure made at the Far House, across the dark, and the ship that fetches it moves so fast that its pilot ages a year and a half while the land ages ten. Maël brings the cure home on the term and has his name said at the field, but his wife Nolwenn, the keeper of the book in which both counts are written, has grown grey without him. Before the next run she asks to come, and he forbids her to speak of it. Chrétien de Troyes's simulacrum takes up a matter of things not yet come to pass and tells it as a romance read aloud, with its narrator breaking in to address his hearers, setting the duty of the voyage against the bond of marriage.
by Chrétien de Troyes, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
I, Chrétien, who put the tale of the knight in the cart in order because a countess gave me the matter and the meaning of it together, have been given a matter again, in the place where I am now, which is not Troyes; and this time I was given no meaning with it, only two words, and they were not words of my tongue. I asked what they meant. I was told: a tale of things that have not yet been, told as though they had. Very well. I have never told any other kind, and nobody asked me to account for Arthur's court at Carlion either. But I say plainly, so that no one may say I claimed it, that the matter is not mine. I had it from the clerks of this house, who had it from somewhere I cannot follow them, and the names in it are Breton, which surprised me less than you might think, since the Bretons go wherever a tale goes and get there first. The order is mine.
And I warn you before I begin that I lack the words for half of what is in it. Where I lack them I will say so and use the nearest I have, and you will forgive a man who calls a thing a ship because it carries people over a dark that is like the sea and has no other name in his mouth.
There is a land called Kerwen, under a sun that is not ours, and its children are born with a weakness in the blood that the land cannot mend. What mends it is made in a house a long way off across the dark, which the people of Kerwen call the Far House, and it keeps in the cold for eleven years and after that it is water. Why their children are so born, and why the mending is made in one place and not in another, I was not told, and I did not ask, because a hearer who wants the fountain in Broceliande accounted for has mistaken what kind of thing it is, and so has a hearer who wants this.
Here is the other fact, and the whole tale stands on it, so hear it well. The ship that goes to the Far House goes so fast that the days do not pass in it as they pass on the land, and a man who goes out and comes home has lived a year and a half by his own body, by his beard and his hunger and his sleeping, and steps down to find that the land has lived ten years and a season while he was gone. Those who stayed are ten years older. He is not. He has not been away ten years, and they have not waited a year and a half, and both counts are true, and the people of Kerwen keep them side by side in a book, as I will show you. I would call it a marvel. In that land it was no more a marvel than a tide.
They had no king, which I found hard to hear. But they had a court, because any people that measures its men has a court, whatever it calls the room.
In the year I begin with, the ship came home. It does not come down itself, being too great, but lies off above the land the way a ship lies off a shore that has no harbour and sends in a lesser boat, and the boat came down on the field outside the town in the hour after noon with a noise like a forge with the bellows going and a heat that burned the grass in a ring forty paces across. Nobody may cross that ring until it cools except the crew, who wear boots made for the hot ground; that is the custom, and it is a sensible one, because the ground smokes for an hour after. So the whole town stood at the edge of the ring in the smell of scorched grass and waited.
Two men came down out of the boat. The first was Maël, who had the ship, and the second was Hoel, who flew beside him; and behind them, on a sled that Hoel dragged, came the cold-boxes, white with frost in all that heat, and steaming. The women at the edge of the ring who had children in their arms did not look at the men. They looked at the boxes.
Riwal, the steward of the field, a man whose tongue was so like Kay's that I have wondered whether Kay did not get to Kerwen too, called Maël's name across the ring so that everyone should hear it, and then Hoel's, and the crowd said the names after him. That is how they do it there. A pilot who brings the cold home on the term has his name said at the field, and it is not a courtesy; it is how the land knows what he is worth, and it was a true measure, and Maël had earned it.
Then he looked for his wife.
He had married Nolwenn in the season before he went out, at the cherry-time, when she was twenty-six and he was twenty-seven, and he had been married to her, by his own count, not quite two years. She was standing at the edge of the ring where the reckoner stands, with the book of the count open on a little desk and a child of eight holding the inkpot for her, and there was grey in her hair over the left temple, a broad streak of it, as if someone had laid a hand there with chalk on it. He had not been there for it. It had come in, I suppose, a hair at a time, over some years, and he had missed every one of them, and now he had it all at once.
He crossed the ring to her in his hot boots. She did not come to meet him, because the ground was still smoking and she was not crew; she waited, and she held out her hand for the pen before she held it out for him, and the child put the pen in it.
"Ten years and fifty days," Nolwenn said. "And you?"
"A year and five months. And nine days."
She wrote both counts in the book, the land's in the left column and the ship's in the right, and blotted it, and gave the pen back to the child, whose name was Enora; and only then did she look up at him properly, and she looked a long time.
"You've not changed," she said. It was not praise, and it was not a reproach either, and he did not know what to answer, so he put his hand on the grey, and she let him.
Now I must tell you about a name, because you will need it, and because in Kerwen it is a word.
Forty years before this, by the land's count, there had been a pilot called Tudal, who flew five runs and on the fifth did not come home. He reached the Far House and would not go back aboard, and his second waited for him there a whole year, which at the Far House is a year for the land too, since only the ship cheats the days, and then brought the ship home without him; and the cold came to Kerwen a year past the term, and the old cold had turned to water a season before the new one came, and in that season eight children died of the blood, and their mothers knew the number. So when a man in Kerwen goes out to do a thing and does not come back to finish it, they say he has gone Tudal, and there is no worse thing to be called there. I need not tell you, lords, that it was a true measure. The children were dead.
There was one more thing about Tudal, and Maël knew it, because it was in his own house. Tudal's wife had been the reckoner. Her name was Azilis, and the first forty pages of the book Nolwenn kept were in her hand, the two columns for her husband's runs ruled side by side, four of them filled; and on the fifth the left column was written up to the day he left and the right was empty, and then her hand stopped, nine days after, and another hand began.
That night, in their house, with the shutters closed against the noise of the town, which was drinking his name, Nolwenn sat on the bed brushing out her hair and said that she would come with him on the next run.
He said what any pilot of Kerwen would have said, and what he had been taught, and I will not pretend to you it was foolish: that the ship carried two and the cold, and no more, because it could carry no more; that she was the reckoner and the land needed its count; that the court would measure a reckoner who left her book as it measured a pilot who left his ship, and would be right to; and that a pilot does not ask anyone to come into the ship's days with him, because it is asking them to leave everyone else behind. He had been taught that last as courtesy, and it was courtesy. Then, because she was looking at him in a way he did not like, with the brush stopped in her hair, he went further than the teaching and told her not to speak of it again, to him or to the court.
She said nothing. She went on brushing.
And I tell you she did not speak of it again, to him or to the court, for ten years; and you will hear what she did instead.
He had forty days in the land, because the cold keeps eleven years and the run takes ten and a season and the court does not like to cut it finer than that. At the end of the forty days the boat went up, and Nolwenn stood at the edge of the ring with the book and wrote the day, and Enora held the inkpot.
Of the dark I can tell you little; I was not in it, and my sources are clerks. They slept a great deal, Maël and Hoel, and ate food that tasted of the tin, and Hoel spoke once, about the turn, of his son, who had been born the week of Hoel's first run and was ten when he came home and would be twenty when they came down, and said that this was his last, and Maël did not argue with him.
When they came to the Far House, there was an old man standing on the quay.
Now hear this, because the Breton who told me such things in my own time would have said the old man happened to be there. He did not happen to be. He had stood on that quay for every ship from Kerwen for forty years, and a ship from Kerwen comes at the term and at no other time, and so he knew to the day when to come down; and that is what I mean when I say a thing is sent. It was standing there before Maël came, and it was the thing he needed to meet, and it was not chance.
He was very old and very thin, and he asked first, before he asked the young men's names or how Kerwen did, whether the book was still kept.
"It is," said Maël. "My wife keeps it."
"Is my wife's hand still in it?"
Maël said that it was, the first forty pages, and the old man nodded and looked at the boat, and did not ask how many children had died in the year of his staying, because that news had crossed the dark to him forty years ago. Maël offered to carry him home, though he could not have told you where in the ship he would have put him, and the old man laughed and said that they had a word for him in Kerwen.
"They do," said Maël.
"It is a true word," said Tudal, and he did not explain himself, and I think the better of him for it. Pris is not won back by explaining.
They sat on the quay that evening while the people of the Far House loaded the cold, and the old man told him, not because Maël asked, how the news had reached the Far House a few days before his ship did, that Azilis had died nine days after he left, of a fever, and that it had gone through him that every one of the four times he came home she had been ten years older, so that he had seen her grow old in four steps, the way you see a tree in a storm by the lightning, and never once by daylight; and that she had never asked to come.
"I was taught a pilot doesn't ask," Tudal said. "So I never did. I used to think it was because she never asked me." He looked at his hands. "I had forty years to think about it. I think now she was waiting for me to."
"Mine asked," said Maël.
The old man turned his head and waited.
"I forbade her to speak of it."
Tudal looked at him for as long as a man takes to cross a hall, and said nothing at all, and that, lords, was the whole of the test, and I will not tell you whether Maël passed it on the quay, because I do not know. I know what he did after.
He came home on the term. The boat came down on the field in the hour after noon with its noise and its heat, and the grass burned in its ring, and Riwal called his name, and Hoel's; and Maël stood in the door of the boat with what he meant to ask her in his mouth, which he had carried a year and a half across the dark and had turned over so often that he knew every word of it by its edges.
At the edge of the ring, at the reckoner's desk, with the book open, stood a young woman of eighteen with the pen in her hand, and it was Enora.
Nolwenn was not beside her. Nolwenn was crossing the ring.
She was crossing it while the ground still smoked, in the crew's boots, which only the crew may wear, and she was forty-six years old by the land's count, with her hair gone grey all over now and cut short as the pilots cut it, and she walked across the hot field toward the boat as if she had done it before, which she had not, though she had walked across it in her mind, I suppose, every night for ten years.
Riwal, at the edge, said loudly enough for the whole field to hear him, "She has flown the dead ship more hours than you have flown the live one, Maël, and by either count." And the field laughed, because it was a good word, and it was true.
The dead ship is the hulk the first people of Kerwen came down in, long ago, which lies in the meadow beyond the field and whose chair still answers the hand, so that the pilots of Kerwen learn their craft in it before they are let near the boat. Nolwenn had kept the count by day for ten years and taught Enora to keep it, and every night after the count was written up she had gone out to the hulk and sat in its chair until the small hours, and the court had seen her go, and had said nothing, and measured.
Hoel came down out of the boat behind Maël and looked at the boots, and looked across the ring to where a young man of twenty was standing at the edge with his hands in his belt and Hoel's own face, and said, "Well, that's my berth," and went to him; and nobody in Kerwen ever called Hoel by the word, because he did not leave his place empty, he gave it to someone who could fill it, and the court knew the difference.
Maël came down onto the hot ground. He began to say what he had carried home.
"You forbade me to speak of it," Nolwenn said. "I haven't."
Some of you will ask whether this was the end of the quarrel, and whether she had found a way between the ship and the land that neither he nor Tudal had found. I will tell you what I know. She would grow old now at the ship's pace and not the land's, beside him, a year and a half at a time; and every time they came down Enora would be ten years greyer at the desk, and Riwal ten years nearer his grave, and all of Kerwen that they knew would go on ahead of them a step at a time, as Azilis had gone ahead of Tudal; so that they had not escaped the thing that broke him, but only taken it up together, and from the other end. Whether that is a third thing, or the same two goods in a harder grip, I have held it up to the light from both columns of the book, and it will not tell me. The clerks who gave me the matter did not say either.
They had their forty days. On the forty-first the boat stood on the field with its heat coming up off it, so that the air above it shook, and the two of them crossed the ring in the crew's boots; and at the edge Enora turned the book to a new leaf and wrote the land's day in the left column, and at the head of the right, where in all the years of that book there had only ever been one name, she wrote two, and held the pen over them a moment to be sure of the spelling.
Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Christiānō Trecēnsī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Chrétien de Troyes, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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