"Bell-BannersFlying" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bell M Shayne)

M. SHAYNE BELL

AND ALL OUR BANNERS FLYING

IN THE SUMMER OF THAT year, on my eighteenth birthday, I drove into Alma, Idaho,
to register for the draft for the Indonesia War. I filled in all the blanks on
the form, printed my name, John Arthur Pembroke, once, signed the form and
handed it to the clerk. He looked at me as if he thought I had potential as a
soldier. As soon as he okayed the form, I walked out of the office. I shoved my
hands in my pockets and stood on the sidewalk in the morning summer sun for a
while, thinking.

The war had dragged on and on -- while I got older and older and was now draft
age. If I stayed here, I would be drafted. I believed that. What the clerk
inside didn't know was that I didn't have to stay in America. My mother was a
citizen of Europe, with a United Kingdom passport. I was half Euro-British. At
eighteen I had to choose to be either European or American, and if I chose to be
European I wouldn't be drafted. Most of my friends thought I should take my
chance and go to Europe and forget this place. I was the one who was not sure. I
thought I wanted to be an American, though I did not want to have to fight to
keep Indonesia together. No one had lifted a finger when Indonesia had forced
the Mindanao Partition, then took over New Guinea, Palau, the Solomons, Sabah.
Indonesia threatened Singapore, Brunei, and the rest of Malaysia in the short
term. The corporations running America had argued that "unification" made the
East Indies more stable. They offered increased trade as proof. A country like
Indonesia could quiet down the region and organize its advance into sweatshops
and ecological devastation. But the independence movements -- in the conquered
territories and on other islands: Borneo, Bali, the Moluccas, Timor -- kept
growing stronger, with covert Chinese, Japanese, and probably Thai help, and now
America was once again defending "vital interests" (oil, cheap goods) in Asia.

I walked down the sidewalk thinking that, were it not for my mother's
nationality, the course of my life would have been out of my control. For three
years in a row I'd watched pudgy military officers on TV spin a Vietnam-era
basket with three hundred sixty-six little plastic capsules that held slips of
paper with dates printed on them, one for every day of the year and February
9.9. The officer would pull out the capsules one at a time, open them, and read
off the dates. The guys born on the first two hundred twenty-five were drafted.
Not all of them came home. For three years my birthday was one of the first two
hundred twenty-five, and I had to sit there, with my high school math or
geography homework unattended in my lap, watching a fat officer represent chance
determining my fate. But thanks to my mother, chance would not determine my fate
where this war was concerned. I would.

I drove our Ford pickup home, parked it in the shade, and walked slowly to the
house. I needed to change back into work clothes and start hauling hay. Mother
was stirring a cake in the kitchen, the birthday cake we'd have with dinner that
night, and she looked up at me with worried eyes. She wiped her hands on her
apron and hugged me and wouldn't let me go change for a while, she just held
onto me.

That night, for my birthday present, she and Father gave me a ticket to England
to visit my Aunt Alice, Mother's sister; Aunt Alice's two children, my cousins
Emily and Clayton; and Uncle Harold, Mother's brother who had never married but
who had "tramped all over the world," as she would put it; "explored the dark
corners," he would say. Mother was so happy that I would finally get to see the
places she loved, the house she had grown up in, the England of the Arthurian
legends she'd told me when I was a boy.

But it was more than that, of course. I lay in bed that night and realized my
parents' present to me was more than a ticket. It was a chance to look around
England and make my choice. My parents had said nothing about this over dinner.
We'd talked about it plenty of times before. But my choice had been with us
through the meal. I knew Mother considered herself blessed to be able to give
her son what all mothers would have given if they could: a sure way out of war,
to life.

IF YOU HAD LOOKED at Emily and Clayton and me that summer, you could not have
known what all of us would go on to do with our lives. I look at the old
photographs Aunt Alice took of us together and see young people with nothing to
set them apart. Clayton and I were barely shaving, maybe every other day, and I
still had half an inch to grow, Clayton maybe an inch and a half. But one thing
about Emily has never changed: in those old photographs and in the pictures of
the woman I now see in the netzines, her long, black hair is wild, windblown, as
if she spends the better part of each day walking along the Somerset coast with
the wind off the sea blowing her hair.

At the time, Aunt Alice was a newly elected Member of Parliament, but Parliament
was in recess, and Emily was on holiday from her boarding school. They picked me
up at Heathrow, and we drove across the moors to Somerset and the family
ancestral home on the west bank of the Parrett River, near where it empties into
the sea. I could smell the sea when I got out of the car.

And apples. The house was surrounded by apple orchards, and the apples were ripe
and falling. The ground was littered with golden and red apples. A handful of
workers holding remotes walked around under the trees. I did not understand what
they were doing till I saw a flash of silver metal moving high up in one of the
nearer trees. I stared, then. The workers were guiding robots picking the
apples. No one I knew in Idaho had robotic help in the fields. Central American
human labor was still cheaper for us.

"Those are rare apples," Aunt Alice said. She came to stand by me. "Some of the
varieties are, perhaps, found nowhere else -- and it's a good thing someone has
them. Apples are in a precarious way worldwide. People grow ten percent of the
varieties our ancestors grew just one hundred years ago. A disease could destroy
any species that reduced. I feel our rarities might someday be important for
grafting strength back into the main stocks."

She talked with me easily about her orchards. She had always talked to me, even
when I was a boy during her visits: even then she would take the time, and I
loved her for it. Now, as then, I found myself interested in whatever she wanted
to talk about -- Central Asian politics, Uzbeki terrorists, modern poets,
apples. Her breadth and sincerity, always clear to me, were what eventually made
her foreign secretary to two prime ministers in Brussels. But I always
remembered her worry about the apples and was not surprised years later at her
treaties with Kazakstan, and her work to preserve the ancient apple forests
there where apples had first evolved.

"Emily will show you the orchards after you unpack," Aunt Alice said.

Servants came to help carry in our bags. Aunt Alice gave me a room on the third
floor, with windows looking out toward the sea, which I could see beyond the
trees. I'd seen the sea only twice before, in California, at Malibu and Laguna
Beach, and I suddenly wanted to get down to this sea and walk along this beach.
I unpacked quickly and thought I should tell Aunt Alice where I was going. I
hurried down to the main floor, looking for her.

The house was quiet and cool in the afternoon heat. I kept thinking of my mother
growing up here. I tried to imagine her as a little girl and later a young woman
on these stairs, walking these hallways, opening doors into all these rooms. I
walked through an open door into a great room paneled in dark wood. An enormous
stone fireplace stood in the far wall, and over the mantle hung a sword. I
walked to the sword. It looked heavy and old. The hilt was worn, but the blade
had been kept polished and it shone even in the dim light. Latin words were
inscribed on it near the hilt.

"Do you read Latin?"

It was Emily, standing in the doorway.

"A little," I said. I'd taken a Latin class in high school, the standard
beginners' course.

Emily crossed to the windows and pulled back the drapes. In the sudden light, I
could read this Latin: Ex Calibur.

"You men are so predictable," Emily said. "I asked Mother whether I would find
you in this room looking at this sword, or whether I would find you in the
library looking at the books. We both decided on the sword."

"I never saw the library," I said, a little annoyed.

"Let me show you where it is."

I followed her and never asked, then, about the sword and its fanciful
inscription. The library was down the hall, and it was enormous, paneled in the
same dark wood as the room with the sword. All the bookshelves were made out of
that wood. I felt the rough finish on the shelves while Emily again crossed to
the windows to open the drapes.

"Lyonnesse wood," Emily said, watching me.

"I've never heard of it."

"Here." She carefully took a book down from its shelf: Richard Carew's Tile
Survey of Cornwall, published in 1602. She set it on the table. The book
crackled when she opened it, but it was not dusty. She turned the pages to an
account of a sunken forest between Cornwall and the Scilly Isles.

"The wood from this forest used to wash up on the beaches, even as far north as
here in Somerset," she said. "People gathered it and made things out of it, like
this house."

"This house is built out of driftwood?" I asked, incredulous. I didn't know what
to make of Emily then. I couldn't decide whether she was teasing me -- telling
me fables to see whether I was simple enough to believe them -- or whether she
was telling the truth.

"Oh, not just the house," she said. "Some of the furniture, too. We have a table
made out of it. You'll see. Tristan came from the land where these forests
grew."

I decided not to ask if she meant the literary Tristan, but I had an idea that
she did. All of this was starting to come together in my mind to make me see the
great joke I was being led up to: a sword inscribed Ex Calibur, wood from a
sunken land, mention of a knight of the round table. "I'd like to walk down to
the sea to look for some of your driftwood," I told her.

Emily reshelved the book and while she did she quoted part of a poem to me:

Say if we three

Will go to the sea

To gather dark wood on the beach.

"What is that from?" I asked.

"A poem I'm writing," she said. "Let's do walk to the beach. It will inspire me.
I'll tell Mother where we're going."

She left, and I walked over to look at the books shelved near the Carew, all of
them in sunlight near the window. The first were medieval books written in
Hebrew. Some had apparently been translated into Latin, a few into English:
Legends of the Jews, The Book of the Jests o/Alexander of Macedon, King Artus.
Other nearby shelves held books in other languages: Robert de Boron's Joseph
d'Arimathie, subtitled Roman de l'estoire dou Graal, Eschenbach's Parzival, a
book titled Queste del Saint Graal. Of course I found Mallory's Le Morte
d'Arthur. Tennyson's Idylls of the King lay open on the table.

All this began to explain my mother's fascination with Arthurian legend. She had
grown up surrounded by all these "artifacts." Someone in the past had loved the
legends of Arthur and had collected these books and the sword. My mother had
loved them in her turn, and she'd made me interested.

Emily came back for me, and we walked through the orchards and picked apples and
carried them to a rocky beach strewn with driftwood, though none of it dark like
the wood in the house. We spent the afternoon gathering driftwood into a pile
taller than our heads for a bonfire we'd burn one night after Clayton and Uncle
Harold came down from Oxford. The waves crashed on the shore and sprayed us with
water. Emily wore no scarf, and I had no hat. We let the wind blow our hair.

Clayton and Uncle Harold drove down from Oxford that evening. Clayton was in his
first year reading mathematics at Oxford, and Uncle Harold lectured there on
history. They arrived just before dinner. Clayton and I looked a little alike --
you could tell we were first cousins. Uncle Harold was as tall and thin as I
remembered, with white hair, a white mustache and trimmed beard, and bright,
happy eyes.

"Tell me about Mary," he said, and I told him about my mother and gave him a
letter she'd sent with me for him. He had me describe our farm: how many
thousand acres it had now, how many head of cattle, the value of the land per
acre. It was more than just polite interest, I knew. He and Aunt Alice had
invested a small fortune in the. farm when Mother married, took her inheritance,
and went to live in America.

After we had talked for maybe ten minutes, Uncle Harold got up and rushed around
the house: he ran up the stairs to unpack; he ran back down to the library to
quickly read my Mother's letter, stuff it in a pocket, then pull books from the
shelves and sit at the table, reading, following his fingers hurriedly along the
lines; he hurried to supper when Aunt Alice called us.

And, of course, the dining-room table was round. It was made out of the same
dark wood as the paneling and shelves. I stood there smiling at the table until
Aunt Alice asked me to sit between Emily and Uncle Harold.

"This is the table I was telling you about," Emily said.

"Made out of wood from a sunken forest," I said, touching its ebony, polished
surface. I expected someone to laugh, but no one did.

"It could be that old," Aunt Alice said. "At least it's old enough to be wobbly.
The wood certainly came from the sea. No trees with wood this dark grow in
England."

"There's a darker wood in the Celebes," Uncle Harold said. "Rare now." And he
began a story about how he had once worked his way through the interior of
Sulawesi, looking for a rumored Malay city in the highlands that had never
submitted to the Dutch or to the independent Indonesia, and which had already
been Christian before the Dutch or even the Portuguese had sailed to the East.
On his way there, Uncle Harold and his porters had come across a small, black
tree growing alone on a barren hillside. The porters had cut it down, carried it
with them, and sold it for a fortune in Ujung Pandang when they'd returned to
the coast.

"But what about the Christians?" Aunt Alice asked.

The conversation went on like that through dinner. Uncle Harold had lived a
remarkable life, some of which I had followed in his letters to Mother and much
of which Mother had told me about' years with the Army of Europe in North Africa
when Europe had been forced to secure its southern border and liberate the
peoples of North Africa from the thugs who'd ruled them. He'd crossed the Sahara
three times, become lifelong friends with Coptic monks, and wrote a history of
their order; later, he'd spent years exploring the Himalayan foothills in India
and Nepal, looking for signs of the Nestorians -- "Or the Yeti," he said, with a
smile -- and poking into Bhutan and Mustang, Sikkim and Tibet, and finally the
outer islands of Indonesia, writing the histories of little-known places and
forgotten peoples. But I kept thinking about war. He had fought in a war.
Eventually I asked him about it.

Everyone looked at me. "Those were glorious years," Uncle Harold said, after a
pause. "Never has good and evil been so clearly allied with opposite sides in a
modern conflict. Those lunatics with nuclear bombs had meant to take over
Europe, loot it, convert any survivors to Islam on the point of a sword -- can
you imagine it? In this age?"

Two women came in and took away the dinner plates, then served dessert.

"Have you considered studying at Oxford? Clayton asked me, and I realized they
were all wondering whether I had come just to visit or whether I had come to
stay. I looked at the dark paneling and the dark furniture and the bright, kind,
intelligent faces around the table, and felt I would be welcome here.

"I've considered Oxford," I said. "My father and mother recommend applying."

We talked, then, about the war in Indonesia and, typically European, they were
all against it.

Aunt Alice and Emily went up to bed soon after dessert. Uncle Harold went back
to his books, and Clayton and I played chess in the room with the fireplace and
the sword till he couldn't stay awake any longer and went to bed. I couldn't
sleep. It was morning in Idaho, and my body hadn't adjusted to the new time. I
sat at the chess table and looked at the sword above the mantle. On an impulse,
I got up and took it down and tried to hold it.

It was heavy. With both hands on the hilt, I could lift the sword above my head
and even swing it, but I tried to imagine fighting with it --the weight would
have made it unwieldy in my hands. The men who had fought with swords centuries
before had held them in only one hand and a shield or battle ax in the other. If
I had had to fight on a medieval battlefield, with weapons this heavy, I would
have been killed in short order: I could not have handled my weapons.

I put back the sword and decided I should go to bed to try to sleep and get
accustomed to the new schedule. On the way to the stairs, I passed the library.
No one was in it. Uncle Harold had gone.

But the room was lit with one guttering candle on the table. The sight of those
books in their shadowy shelves and the pool of candlelight on the dark table
strewn with papers and books has remained etched in my memory. I walked to the
table and saw that someone had turned Idylls of the King to a new page. Uncle
Harold had pulled clown old Dutch books on the East Indies, and one of his own,
his History of the Celebes and the Outer Moluccas. His book was left open on the
table, and he had taken a pen and crossed out three paragraphs in chapter nine
about the early Christian missionaries and penciled notes in the margin. He must
have been preparing the book for a reprinting. The papers at the far end of the
table were poems of Emily's, in progress. The top paper read:
Say if we three
Will go to the sea,
To gather dark wood on the beach.

We'd bum it at night,
To tame with the light
The creatures that haunt us in dreams.

I put down the poem and thought I should not look at Emily's papers like this. I
walked up to my room and went to bed. When I finally slept, I dreamed I was with
armies of men fighting with swords and battle axes on a Somerset beach where
great bonfires burned. My opponent was potbellied, but strong. I could barely
lift my sword and shield, they were so heavy, but he could handle his quite
well. All I could manage to do was parry away his thrusts and stabs and keep
backing up toward the sea.

He was going to kill me.

"Who are you?" I asked him, breathless.

"Robert de Boron," he grunted, and I thought, good, if he's Robert de Boron, the
writer, maybe I can reason with him, so I tried to keep him talking. "Why do we
have to fight like this?" I asked. "We shouldn't be here. What kind of work did
you do before the war, anyway?"

"I was a baker," he shouted at me, and my heart sank to think that a man who had
baked pastries and bread would kill me. He wasn't a writer at all, he just had a
writer's name. I kept talking to him anyway, telling him I had been a farmer and
that my family had crops in the field that needed to be harvested, and
eventually I asked him not to kill me. He looked at me oddly, but stepped back,
and we stopped fighting. I shouted at my friends to stop, and the baker shouted
at his, and eventually everyone did stop fighting and our two sides separated
and went to the bonfires to cook supper. I would not sit by a fire to eat,
because I did not trust the peace to hold, and I hurried through the crowds
looking for a blacksmith. I wanted to ask him to draw off some of the metal from
my weapons to make them lighter so I could handle them

And I woke. I looked at my watch. It was four in the morning. The moon shone
softly through the window. I lay there remembering my dream. The guns I'd carry
in Indonesia would be as heavy as the old sword downstairs, and many times more
deadly. It wouldn't be like in my dream. If I went to war I'd first be taught
how to handle my weapons.

And I would have to learn that, I realized. I would have to learn how to use
deadly weapons. I decided that, lying there in the dark. America had been my
country all my life: it would be my country for the rest of it. It needed people
who would do what I was going to do. I did not support the war. If America were
fighting to protect an ally from tyranny I would join the army, but that was not
what this war was about. So the army of my country would have to draft me to get
me to fight its current battles. What mattered was what would come after.

I sat up and saw myself darkly in the dresser mirror. I would have to live with
this decision and remember it every time I looked in a mirror the rest of my
life. People back home would support me at first, before they knew what I was
going to do. The peace movement was not loved, yet. It didn't matter. I would go
to war, then come home to work for the peace movement. I'd have more credibility
if I had seen war and afterward worked for peace. It was the only way I could
think to make it work. Insisting that one's country live up to its highest
ideals was not unpatriotic.

I resented being eighteen and forced to make decisions like this. But when, I
wondered, in the history of humankind hadn't eighteen-year-olds been forced to
make decisions about killing and being killed?

A wind was blowing, and I could hear the sea crashing on the beach. I got up to
look out the windows and saw Uncle Harold pacing back and forth on the lawn, out
toward the orchards. His hair and beard were white in the moonlight. He would
pull on his beard, then gesticulate with his hands as if he were carrying on
some argument in his mind or attempting to convince someone of a course of
action he feared or found preposterous. I thought he looked like Don Quixote,
parted, somehow, from Sancho and Rocinante. Or maybe Sancho was sleeping in the
orchard and this pacing of my uncle's was some knightly vigil he had to keep to
honor a vow.

I watched him and thought how he had fought in a brutal war for ideals he
believed in, and he'd seen his side triumph. The North African War had been a
grand effort, so different from what I would be called to take part in.

I watched Uncle Harold and thought of his interest in Arthurian legend -- of the
interest of all my British family in those legends -- and how it was not the
Arthurian wars they cared about, despite the sword's place of honor above the
mantel. It was the love in the Tennyson poem; the magic, in Emily's poem. I
began to wonder, given Uncle Harold's delving into the histories of Nestorian
and Celebes Christians, whether his explorations and studies were a continuing
quest for the Holy Grail.

I DECIDED NOT to say anything about my decision for a few days. I wanted to
enjoy a little more time in England before facing my relatives' questions. Uncle
Harold was not at breakfast. Aunt Alice was in a hurry to get back to Brussels
and Parliament, which had been called into session to debate an American request
for logistical support in an ongoing offensive. Emily and Clayton and I tried to
stay out of her whirl of activity and waved good-bye to her from the steps. When
she was gone, Emily and Clayton looked at me, and we all went inside and met
Uncle Harold in the hallway.

"You have just enough time to make your banners before we set off," he said.

"To where?" Emily laughed.

"The beach, a bonfire, and your fates!" he answered.

I laughed, but servants came in with poles for each of us to fly banners from,
and Emily took Clayton and me upstairs to the second-floor sewing room where she
pulled out boxes of scraps of material of all kinds and colors, and we actually
started making banners to carry before us on a walk to the beach.

It was slow going for Clayton and me, since the sewing we had done up to that
point amounted to sewing buttons back on shirts. Emily found three long strips
of white cloth, sewed them around the end of her pole, and left to pack a picnic
lunch. Clayton wanted a red banner because he'd become a Marxist, as he called
it, at Oxford, but we couldn't find any red scraps, so he had to settle for
burgundy. I cut equal lengths of blue, orange, green, and purple cloth and made
a banner that would fly like a rainbow.

I finished last, and when I got downstairs I saw Uncle Harold taking the sword
down from above the mantle. Clayton had found towels and swimsuits for the men
and a tall umbrella. Emily came from the kitchen with a picnic basket,
sunscreen, and her towel and swimsuit under her arm, and Uncle Harold led us
out, sword held before him, the three of us following along behind with our
banners blowing in the wind.

We picked apples off the ground in the orchard to take with us. I carried the
picnic basket. When we came to the beach, Uncle Harold had us post our banners
on three different peaks of rock around the driftwood Emily and I had gathered.
We spent the day swimming, laughing, lying in the sun. We ate the picnic lunch
late in the afternoon.

At dusk we lit the bonfire, and it roared above us. We had to stand back quite
far until it burned down and we could sit on rocks close to it. Uncle Harold
suddenly stood and thrust the sword into the sand in front of Emily, Clayton,
and me. He stood there with his hands on the hilt, looking at us, knightly,
somehow, the way Don Quixote must have looked even as an old man. I didn't know
what to expect. Emily and Clayton looked a little bewildered, too.

"I am the oldest in our family," Uncle Harold said, finally, "and as such I have
brought you here to perform a sacred duty. This night I will knight you into the
order of your family."

This was unexpected, but theatrical, and I found myself wanting to go along with
my uncle's fun. So I didn't laugh. Our banners snapped in the wind in the rocks
above us.

"First hear the history of your family," he said. "And believe it. You are
descended from Arthur, King at Camelot, he of legend."

"And Guinevere?" Emily asked. She looked startled, as if this talk of Uncle
Harold's were confirmation of a history she had guessed at.

"Yes," Uncle Harold said. Emily brushed back her hair and looked at the fire.
Her reaction surprised me. It was hard for me to take this seriously. Clayton
was watching Uncle Harold intently but said nothing.

Uncle Harold looked at me till I'd stopped smiling. None of us spoke. I could
hear only waves crashing on the rocks and the bonfire burning till Uncle Harold
spoke again.

"Your Great-Uncle George brought your mothers and me to this beach thirty years
ago and knighted us: Alice to the work of state, that she might preserve the
political integrity of this land; Mary to the nurturing of farmland, which would
blossom for her and increase the fortune of the family; me to the pursuit of
knowledge forgotten in the West, but kept alive in hidden places of the world."

He went on to tell us the "history" of our family and how the dream of Camelot
had been kept alive through generations, not centered on a place, but realized
through the lives of its descendants who had worked to benefit humankind, who
had given their lives to high causes. To be knighted with Ex Calibur would be to
accept a mantle of obligation to humanity. More than that, we had been drawn
inexorably to our lives' works, he told us. We would do what this age needed
most. Everything about our lives had been fated.

"Step forward, Emily," he said, "and kneel before Ex Calibur."

She did so, and her white blouse and black hair blew back in the wind. "I knight
you, Emily, to the work of poetry," Uncle Harold said. "I give you the power to
slay all dragons of despair, sloth, or rejection standing in the way of your
insights and success. I bless you with the ability to bring written beauty to
the lives of people who need beauty."

He drew Ex Calibur from the sand and solemnly touched Emily's shoulders with the
blade of it, first the left, then the right, then the left again. He touched the
sand in front of her with the tip of the sword to complete the shape of the
cross, then he thrust the sword back in the sand. Emily's eyes shone. She stood
slowly, almost regally, and did not sit down again. She folded her arms and
watched the rest of us, her hair blowing wildly.

Uncle Harold called Clayton to kneel in front of the sword. "I knight you,
Clayton, to the theories of physics," Uncle Harold said, "that you might lead
humankind to the stars." He drew the sword out of the sand, touched Clayton's
shoulders, and had him stand back by the fire.

I was next. I wondered what Uncle Harold would knight me to. He did not know me
like he knew Emily and Clayton. I knelt before the sword. "I knight you, John
Arthur, to the work of peace, that the world might rest and be blessed." And he
drew the sword out of the sand and touched it to my shoulders. The blade gleamed
in the firelight -- or was it the moonlight? -- for an instant, and I shivered.
I stood and took my place around the fire. All four of us stood there quietly.

How had he known? He'd confirmed my decision. Suddenly it was as if I saw myself
marching with thousands of others and speaking to crowds and writing works that
transformed nations and sent all bakers home from the battlefields.

"I charge you," Uncle Harold said, "to call together the young of the family
when they are of age to knight them in their turn."

They'd planned this, I suddenly knew -- my mother and my aunt and uncle. This
was why I had had to come to England. I did not question, then, whether Uncle
Harold's history of our family was true. Facts did not matter to me at that
time: I wanted his story to he true. I suddenly wanted the sword to be Ex
Calibur; the round table in the dining room, if not the original, at least
patterned after it; and all the dark paneling truly from the sunken forests of
Lyonnesse.

"Gather your banners!" Uncle Harold cried, and we scrambled into the rocks after
them. I felt closer to Emily and Clayton then, different from the way I'd felt
about them before: from that day on we were more than family; we were knights on
a quest together. I could sense the beauty and adventure and hope we would each
bring into the world before we had done it.

Uncle Harold led us back through the darkness, guided only by moonlight, through
the orchards of apples so fragrant in the night. For the first time in England I
remembered my mother's stories of Avalon and its apple orchards, and I shivered
again and looked at the moonlight gleaming on the blade of the sword my uncle
held. I lifted my banner higher, then, at the sight of it, for Emily and Clayton
and I brought along with us our dreams now, bright and alive in us, and all our
banners flying.







M. SHAYNE BELL

AND ALL OUR BANNERS FLYING

IN THE SUMMER OF THAT year, on my eighteenth birthday, I drove into Alma, Idaho,
to register for the draft for the Indonesia War. I filled in all the blanks on
the form, printed my name, John Arthur Pembroke, once, signed the form and
handed it to the clerk. He looked at me as if he thought I had potential as a
soldier. As soon as he okayed the form, I walked out of the office. I shoved my
hands in my pockets and stood on the sidewalk in the morning summer sun for a
while, thinking.

The war had dragged on and on -- while I got older and older and was now draft
age. If I stayed here, I would be drafted. I believed that. What the clerk
inside didn't know was that I didn't have to stay in America. My mother was a
citizen of Europe, with a United Kingdom passport. I was half Euro-British. At
eighteen I had to choose to be either European or American, and if I chose to be
European I wouldn't be drafted. Most of my friends thought I should take my
chance and go to Europe and forget this place. I was the one who was not sure. I
thought I wanted to be an American, though I did not want to have to fight to
keep Indonesia together. No one had lifted a finger when Indonesia had forced
the Mindanao Partition, then took over New Guinea, Palau, the Solomons, Sabah.
Indonesia threatened Singapore, Brunei, and the rest of Malaysia in the short
term. The corporations running America had argued that "unification" made the
East Indies more stable. They offered increased trade as proof. A country like
Indonesia could quiet down the region and organize its advance into sweatshops
and ecological devastation. But the independence movements -- in the conquered
territories and on other islands: Borneo, Bali, the Moluccas, Timor -- kept
growing stronger, with covert Chinese, Japanese, and probably Thai help, and now
America was once again defending "vital interests" (oil, cheap goods) in Asia.

I walked down the sidewalk thinking that, were it not for my mother's
nationality, the course of my life would have been out of my control. For three
years in a row I'd watched pudgy military officers on TV spin a Vietnam-era
basket with three hundred sixty-six little plastic capsules that held slips of
paper with dates printed on them, one for every day of the year and February
9.9. The officer would pull out the capsules one at a time, open them, and read
off the dates. The guys born on the first two hundred twenty-five were drafted.
Not all of them came home. For three years my birthday was one of the first two
hundred twenty-five, and I had to sit there, with my high school math or
geography homework unattended in my lap, watching a fat officer represent chance
determining my fate. But thanks to my mother, chance would not determine my fate
where this war was concerned. I would.

I drove our Ford pickup home, parked it in the shade, and walked slowly to the
house. I needed to change back into work clothes and start hauling hay. Mother
was stirring a cake in the kitchen, the birthday cake we'd have with dinner that
night, and she looked up at me with worried eyes. She wiped her hands on her
apron and hugged me and wouldn't let me go change for a while, she just held
onto me.

That night, for my birthday present, she and Father gave me a ticket to England
to visit my Aunt Alice, Mother's sister; Aunt Alice's two children, my cousins
Emily and Clayton; and Uncle Harold, Mother's brother who had never married but
who had "tramped all over the world," as she would put it; "explored the dark
corners," he would say. Mother was so happy that I would finally get to see the
places she loved, the house she had grown up in, the England of the Arthurian
legends she'd told me when I was a boy.

But it was more than that, of course. I lay in bed that night and realized my
parents' present to me was more than a ticket. It was a chance to look around
England and make my choice. My parents had said nothing about this over dinner.
We'd talked about it plenty of times before. But my choice had been with us
through the meal. I knew Mother considered herself blessed to be able to give
her son what all mothers would have given if they could: a sure way out of war,
to life.

IF YOU HAD LOOKED at Emily and Clayton and me that summer, you could not have
known what all of us would go on to do with our lives. I look at the old
photographs Aunt Alice took of us together and see young people with nothing to
set them apart. Clayton and I were barely shaving, maybe every other day, and I
still had half an inch to grow, Clayton maybe an inch and a half. But one thing
about Emily has never changed: in those old photographs and in the pictures of
the woman I now see in the netzines, her long, black hair is wild, windblown, as
if she spends the better part of each day walking along the Somerset coast with
the wind off the sea blowing her hair.

At the time, Aunt Alice was a newly elected Member of Parliament, but Parliament
was in recess, and Emily was on holiday from her boarding school. They picked me
up at Heathrow, and we drove across the moors to Somerset and the family
ancestral home on the west bank of the Parrett River, near where it empties into
the sea. I could smell the sea when I got out of the car.

And apples. The house was surrounded by apple orchards, and the apples were ripe
and falling. The ground was littered with golden and red apples. A handful of
workers holding remotes walked around under the trees. I did not understand what
they were doing till I saw a flash of silver metal moving high up in one of the
nearer trees. I stared, then. The workers were guiding robots picking the
apples. No one I knew in Idaho had robotic help in the fields. Central American
human labor was still cheaper for us.

"Those are rare apples," Aunt Alice said. She came to stand by me. "Some of the
varieties are, perhaps, found nowhere else -- and it's a good thing someone has
them. Apples are in a precarious way worldwide. People grow ten percent of the
varieties our ancestors grew just one hundred years ago. A disease could destroy
any species that reduced. I feel our rarities might someday be important for
grafting strength back into the main stocks."

She talked with me easily about her orchards. She had always talked to me, even
when I was a boy during her visits: even then she would take the time, and I
loved her for it. Now, as then, I found myself interested in whatever she wanted
to talk about -- Central Asian politics, Uzbeki terrorists, modern poets,
apples. Her breadth and sincerity, always clear to me, were what eventually made
her foreign secretary to two prime ministers in Brussels. But I always
remembered her worry about the apples and was not surprised years later at her
treaties with Kazakstan, and her work to preserve the ancient apple forests
there where apples had first evolved.

"Emily will show you the orchards after you unpack," Aunt Alice said.

Servants came to help carry in our bags. Aunt Alice gave me a room on the third
floor, with windows looking out toward the sea, which I could see beyond the
trees. I'd seen the sea only twice before, in California, at Malibu and Laguna
Beach, and I suddenly wanted to get down to this sea and walk along this beach.
I unpacked quickly and thought I should tell Aunt Alice where I was going. I
hurried down to the main floor, looking for her.

The house was quiet and cool in the afternoon heat. I kept thinking of my mother
growing up here. I tried to imagine her as a little girl and later a young woman
on these stairs, walking these hallways, opening doors into all these rooms. I
walked through an open door into a great room paneled in dark wood. An enormous
stone fireplace stood in the far wall, and over the mantle hung a sword. I
walked to the sword. It looked heavy and old. The hilt was worn, but the blade
had been kept polished and it shone even in the dim light. Latin words were
inscribed on it near the hilt.

"Do you read Latin?"

It was Emily, standing in the doorway.

"A little," I said. I'd taken a Latin class in high school, the standard
beginners' course.

Emily crossed to the windows and pulled back the drapes. In the sudden light, I
could read this Latin: Ex Calibur.

"You men are so predictable," Emily said. "I asked Mother whether I would find
you in this room looking at this sword, or whether I would find you in the
library looking at the books. We both decided on the sword."

"I never saw the library," I said, a little annoyed.

"Let me show you where it is."

I followed her and never asked, then, about the sword and its fanciful
inscription. The library was down the hall, and it was enormous, paneled in the
same dark wood as the room with the sword. All the bookshelves were made out of
that wood. I felt the rough finish on the shelves while Emily again crossed to
the windows to open the drapes.

"Lyonnesse wood," Emily said, watching me.

"I've never heard of it."

"Here." She carefully took a book down from its shelf: Richard Carew's Tile
Survey of Cornwall, published in 1602. She set it on the table. The book
crackled when she opened it, but it was not dusty. She turned the pages to an
account of a sunken forest between Cornwall and the Scilly Isles.

"The wood from this forest used to wash up on the beaches, even as far north as
here in Somerset," she said. "People gathered it and made things out of it, like
this house."

"This house is built out of driftwood?" I asked, incredulous. I didn't know what
to make of Emily then. I couldn't decide whether she was teasing me -- telling
me fables to see whether I was simple enough to believe them -- or whether she
was telling the truth.

"Oh, not just the house," she said. "Some of the furniture, too. We have a table
made out of it. You'll see. Tristan came from the land where these forests
grew."

I decided not to ask if she meant the literary Tristan, but I had an idea that
she did. All of this was starting to come together in my mind to make me see the
great joke I was being led up to: a sword inscribed Ex Calibur, wood from a
sunken land, mention of a knight of the round table. "I'd like to walk down to
the sea to look for some of your driftwood," I told her.

Emily reshelved the book and while she did she quoted part of a poem to me:

Say if we three

Will go to the sea

To gather dark wood on the beach.

"What is that from?" I asked.

"A poem I'm writing," she said. "Let's do walk to the beach. It will inspire me.
I'll tell Mother where we're going."

She left, and I walked over to look at the books shelved near the Carew, all of
them in sunlight near the window. The first were medieval books written in
Hebrew. Some had apparently been translated into Latin, a few into English:
Legends of the Jews, The Book of the Jests o/Alexander of Macedon, King Artus.
Other nearby shelves held books in other languages: Robert de Boron's Joseph
d'Arimathie, subtitled Roman de l'estoire dou Graal, Eschenbach's Parzival, a
book titled Queste del Saint Graal. Of course I found Mallory's Le Morte
d'Arthur. Tennyson's Idylls of the King lay open on the table.

All this began to explain my mother's fascination with Arthurian legend. She had
grown up surrounded by all these "artifacts." Someone in the past had loved the
legends of Arthur and had collected these books and the sword. My mother had
loved them in her turn, and she'd made me interested.

Emily came back for me, and we walked through the orchards and picked apples and
carried them to a rocky beach strewn with driftwood, though none of it dark like
the wood in the house. We spent the afternoon gathering driftwood into a pile
taller than our heads for a bonfire we'd burn one night after Clayton and Uncle
Harold came down from Oxford. The waves crashed on the shore and sprayed us with
water. Emily wore no scarf, and I had no hat. We let the wind blow our hair.

Clayton and Uncle Harold drove down from Oxford that evening. Clayton was in his
first year reading mathematics at Oxford, and Uncle Harold lectured there on
history. They arrived just before dinner. Clayton and I looked a little alike --
you could tell we were first cousins. Uncle Harold was as tall and thin as I
remembered, with white hair, a white mustache and trimmed beard, and bright,
happy eyes.

"Tell me about Mary," he said, and I told him about my mother and gave him a
letter she'd sent with me for him. He had me describe our farm: how many
thousand acres it had now, how many head of cattle, the value of the land per
acre. It was more than just polite interest, I knew. He and Aunt Alice had
invested a small fortune in the. farm when Mother married, took her inheritance,
and went to live in America.

After we had talked for maybe ten minutes, Uncle Harold got up and rushed around
the house: he ran up the stairs to unpack; he ran back down to the library to
quickly read my Mother's letter, stuff it in a pocket, then pull books from the
shelves and sit at the table, reading, following his fingers hurriedly along the
lines; he hurried to supper when Aunt Alice called us.

And, of course, the dining-room table was round. It was made out of the same
dark wood as the paneling and shelves. I stood there smiling at the table until
Aunt Alice asked me to sit between Emily and Uncle Harold.

"This is the table I was telling you about," Emily said.

"Made out of wood from a sunken forest," I said, touching its ebony, polished
surface. I expected someone to laugh, but no one did.

"It could be that old," Aunt Alice said. "At least it's old enough to be wobbly.
The wood certainly came from the sea. No trees with wood this dark grow in
England."

"There's a darker wood in the Celebes," Uncle Harold said. "Rare now." And he
began a story about how he had once worked his way through the interior of
Sulawesi, looking for a rumored Malay city in the highlands that had never
submitted to the Dutch or to the independent Indonesia, and which had already
been Christian before the Dutch or even the Portuguese had sailed to the East.
On his way there, Uncle Harold and his porters had come across a small, black
tree growing alone on a barren hillside. The porters had cut it down, carried it
with them, and sold it for a fortune in Ujung Pandang when they'd returned to
the coast.

"But what about the Christians?" Aunt Alice asked.

The conversation went on like that through dinner. Uncle Harold had lived a
remarkable life, some of which I had followed in his letters to Mother and much
of which Mother had told me about' years with the Army of Europe in North Africa
when Europe had been forced to secure its southern border and liberate the
peoples of North Africa from the thugs who'd ruled them. He'd crossed the Sahara
three times, become lifelong friends with Coptic monks, and wrote a history of
their order; later, he'd spent years exploring the Himalayan foothills in India
and Nepal, looking for signs of the Nestorians -- "Or the Yeti," he said, with a
smile -- and poking into Bhutan and Mustang, Sikkim and Tibet, and finally the
outer islands of Indonesia, writing the histories of little-known places and
forgotten peoples. But I kept thinking about war. He had fought in a war.
Eventually I asked him about it.

Everyone looked at me. "Those were glorious years," Uncle Harold said, after a
pause. "Never has good and evil been so clearly allied with opposite sides in a
modern conflict. Those lunatics with nuclear bombs had meant to take over
Europe, loot it, convert any survivors to Islam on the point of a sword -- can
you imagine it? In this age?"

Two women came in and took away the dinner plates, then served dessert.

"Have you considered studying at Oxford? Clayton asked me, and I realized they
were all wondering whether I had come just to visit or whether I had come to
stay. I looked at the dark paneling and the dark furniture and the bright, kind,
intelligent faces around the table, and felt I would be welcome here.

"I've considered Oxford," I said. "My father and mother recommend applying."

We talked, then, about the war in Indonesia and, typically European, they were
all against it.

Aunt Alice and Emily went up to bed soon after dessert. Uncle Harold went back
to his books, and Clayton and I played chess in the room with the fireplace and
the sword till he couldn't stay awake any longer and went to bed. I couldn't
sleep. It was morning in Idaho, and my body hadn't adjusted to the new time. I
sat at the chess table and looked at the sword above the mantle. On an impulse,
I got up and took it down and tried to hold it.

It was heavy. With both hands on the hilt, I could lift the sword above my head
and even swing it, but I tried to imagine fighting with it --the weight would
have made it unwieldy in my hands. The men who had fought with swords centuries
before had held them in only one hand and a shield or battle ax in the other. If
I had had to fight on a medieval battlefield, with weapons this heavy, I would
have been killed in short order: I could not have handled my weapons.

I put back the sword and decided I should go to bed to try to sleep and get
accustomed to the new schedule. On the way to the stairs, I passed the library.
No one was in it. Uncle Harold had gone.

But the room was lit with one guttering candle on the table. The sight of those
books in their shadowy shelves and the pool of candlelight on the dark table
strewn with papers and books has remained etched in my memory. I walked to the
table and saw that someone had turned Idylls of the King to a new page. Uncle
Harold had pulled clown old Dutch books on the East Indies, and one of his own,
his History of the Celebes and the Outer Moluccas. His book was left open on the
table, and he had taken a pen and crossed out three paragraphs in chapter nine
about the early Christian missionaries and penciled notes in the margin. He must
have been preparing the book for a reprinting. The papers at the far end of the
table were poems of Emily's, in progress. The top paper read:
Say if we three
Will go to the sea,
To gather dark wood on the beach.

We'd bum it at night,
To tame with the light
The creatures that haunt us in dreams.

I put down the poem and thought I should not look at Emily's papers like this. I
walked up to my room and went to bed. When I finally slept, I dreamed I was with
armies of men fighting with swords and battle axes on a Somerset beach where
great bonfires burned. My opponent was potbellied, but strong. I could barely
lift my sword and shield, they were so heavy, but he could handle his quite
well. All I could manage to do was parry away his thrusts and stabs and keep
backing up toward the sea.

He was going to kill me.

"Who are you?" I asked him, breathless.

"Robert de Boron," he grunted, and I thought, good, if he's Robert de Boron, the
writer, maybe I can reason with him, so I tried to keep him talking. "Why do we
have to fight like this?" I asked. "We shouldn't be here. What kind of work did
you do before the war, anyway?"

"I was a baker," he shouted at me, and my heart sank to think that a man who had
baked pastries and bread would kill me. He wasn't a writer at all, he just had a
writer's name. I kept talking to him anyway, telling him I had been a farmer and
that my family had crops in the field that needed to be harvested, and
eventually I asked him not to kill me. He looked at me oddly, but stepped back,
and we stopped fighting. I shouted at my friends to stop, and the baker shouted
at his, and eventually everyone did stop fighting and our two sides separated
and went to the bonfires to cook supper. I would not sit by a fire to eat,
because I did not trust the peace to hold, and I hurried through the crowds
looking for a blacksmith. I wanted to ask him to draw off some of the metal from
my weapons to make them lighter so I could handle them

And I woke. I looked at my watch. It was four in the morning. The moon shone
softly through the window. I lay there remembering my dream. The guns I'd carry
in Indonesia would be as heavy as the old sword downstairs, and many times more
deadly. It wouldn't be like in my dream. If I went to war I'd first be taught
how to handle my weapons.

And I would have to learn that, I realized. I would have to learn how to use
deadly weapons. I decided that, lying there in the dark. America had been my
country all my life: it would be my country for the rest of it. It needed people
who would do what I was going to do. I did not support the war. If America were
fighting to protect an ally from tyranny I would join the army, but that was not
what this war was about. So the army of my country would have to draft me to get
me to fight its current battles. What mattered was what would come after.

I sat up and saw myself darkly in the dresser mirror. I would have to live with
this decision and remember it every time I looked in a mirror the rest of my
life. People back home would support me at first, before they knew what I was
going to do. The peace movement was not loved, yet. It didn't matter. I would go
to war, then come home to work for the peace movement. I'd have more credibility
if I had seen war and afterward worked for peace. It was the only way I could
think to make it work. Insisting that one's country live up to its highest
ideals was not unpatriotic.

I resented being eighteen and forced to make decisions like this. But when, I
wondered, in the history of humankind hadn't eighteen-year-olds been forced to
make decisions about killing and being killed?

A wind was blowing, and I could hear the sea crashing on the beach. I got up to
look out the windows and saw Uncle Harold pacing back and forth on the lawn, out
toward the orchards. His hair and beard were white in the moonlight. He would
pull on his beard, then gesticulate with his hands as if he were carrying on
some argument in his mind or attempting to convince someone of a course of
action he feared or found preposterous. I thought he looked like Don Quixote,
parted, somehow, from Sancho and Rocinante. Or maybe Sancho was sleeping in the
orchard and this pacing of my uncle's was some knightly vigil he had to keep to
honor a vow.

I watched him and thought how he had fought in a brutal war for ideals he
believed in, and he'd seen his side triumph. The North African War had been a
grand effort, so different from what I would be called to take part in.

I watched Uncle Harold and thought of his interest in Arthurian legend -- of the
interest of all my British family in those legends -- and how it was not the
Arthurian wars they cared about, despite the sword's place of honor above the
mantel. It was the love in the Tennyson poem; the magic, in Emily's poem. I
began to wonder, given Uncle Harold's delving into the histories of Nestorian
and Celebes Christians, whether his explorations and studies were a continuing
quest for the Holy Grail.

I DECIDED NOT to say anything about my decision for a few days. I wanted to
enjoy a little more time in England before facing my relatives' questions. Uncle
Harold was not at breakfast. Aunt Alice was in a hurry to get back to Brussels
and Parliament, which had been called into session to debate an American request
for logistical support in an ongoing offensive. Emily and Clayton and I tried to
stay out of her whirl of activity and waved good-bye to her from the steps. When
she was gone, Emily and Clayton looked at me, and we all went inside and met
Uncle Harold in the hallway.

"You have just enough time to make your banners before we set off," he said.

"To where?" Emily laughed.

"The beach, a bonfire, and your fates!" he answered.

I laughed, but servants came in with poles for each of us to fly banners from,
and Emily took Clayton and me upstairs to the second-floor sewing room where she
pulled out boxes of scraps of material of all kinds and colors, and we actually
started making banners to carry before us on a walk to the beach.

It was slow going for Clayton and me, since the sewing we had done up to that
point amounted to sewing buttons back on shirts. Emily found three long strips
of white cloth, sewed them around the end of her pole, and left to pack a picnic
lunch. Clayton wanted a red banner because he'd become a Marxist, as he called
it, at Oxford, but we couldn't find any red scraps, so he had to settle for
burgundy. I cut equal lengths of blue, orange, green, and purple cloth and made
a banner that would fly like a rainbow.

I finished last, and when I got downstairs I saw Uncle Harold taking the sword
down from above the mantle. Clayton had found towels and swimsuits for the men
and a tall umbrella. Emily came from the kitchen with a picnic basket,
sunscreen, and her towel and swimsuit under her arm, and Uncle Harold led us
out, sword held before him, the three of us following along behind with our
banners blowing in the wind.

We picked apples off the ground in the orchard to take with us. I carried the
picnic basket. When we came to the beach, Uncle Harold had us post our banners
on three different peaks of rock around the driftwood Emily and I had gathered.
We spent the day swimming, laughing, lying in the sun. We ate the picnic lunch
late in the afternoon.

At dusk we lit the bonfire, and it roared above us. We had to stand back quite
far until it burned down and we could sit on rocks close to it. Uncle Harold
suddenly stood and thrust the sword into the sand in front of Emily, Clayton,
and me. He stood there with his hands on the hilt, looking at us, knightly,
somehow, the way Don Quixote must have looked even as an old man. I didn't know
what to expect. Emily and Clayton looked a little bewildered, too.

"I am the oldest in our family," Uncle Harold said, finally, "and as such I have
brought you here to perform a sacred duty. This night I will knight you into the
order of your family."

This was unexpected, but theatrical, and I found myself wanting to go along with
my uncle's fun. So I didn't laugh. Our banners snapped in the wind in the rocks
above us.

"First hear the history of your family," he said. "And believe it. You are
descended from Arthur, King at Camelot, he of legend."

"And Guinevere?" Emily asked. She looked startled, as if this talk of Uncle
Harold's were confirmation of a history she had guessed at.

"Yes," Uncle Harold said. Emily brushed back her hair and looked at the fire.
Her reaction surprised me. It was hard for me to take this seriously. Clayton
was watching Uncle Harold intently but said nothing.

Uncle Harold looked at me till I'd stopped smiling. None of us spoke. I could
hear only waves crashing on the rocks and the bonfire burning till Uncle Harold
spoke again.

"Your Great-Uncle George brought your mothers and me to this beach thirty years
ago and knighted us: Alice to the work of state, that she might preserve the
political integrity of this land; Mary to the nurturing of farmland, which would
blossom for her and increase the fortune of the family; me to the pursuit of
knowledge forgotten in the West, but kept alive in hidden places of the world."

He went on to tell us the "history" of our family and how the dream of Camelot
had been kept alive through generations, not centered on a place, but realized
through the lives of its descendants who had worked to benefit humankind, who
had given their lives to high causes. To be knighted with Ex Calibur would be to
accept a mantle of obligation to humanity. More than that, we had been drawn
inexorably to our lives' works, he told us. We would do what this age needed
most. Everything about our lives had been fated.

"Step forward, Emily," he said, "and kneel before Ex Calibur."

She did so, and her white blouse and black hair blew back in the wind. "I knight
you, Emily, to the work of poetry," Uncle Harold said. "I give you the power to
slay all dragons of despair, sloth, or rejection standing in the way of your
insights and success. I bless you with the ability to bring written beauty to
the lives of people who need beauty."

He drew Ex Calibur from the sand and solemnly touched Emily's shoulders with the
blade of it, first the left, then the right, then the left again. He touched the
sand in front of her with the tip of the sword to complete the shape of the
cross, then he thrust the sword back in the sand. Emily's eyes shone. She stood
slowly, almost regally, and did not sit down again. She folded her arms and
watched the rest of us, her hair blowing wildly.

Uncle Harold called Clayton to kneel in front of the sword. "I knight you,
Clayton, to the theories of physics," Uncle Harold said, "that you might lead
humankind to the stars." He drew the sword out of the sand, touched Clayton's
shoulders, and had him stand back by the fire.

I was next. I wondered what Uncle Harold would knight me to. He did not know me
like he knew Emily and Clayton. I knelt before the sword. "I knight you, John
Arthur, to the work of peace, that the world might rest and be blessed." And he
drew the sword out of the sand and touched it to my shoulders. The blade gleamed
in the firelight -- or was it the moonlight? -- for an instant, and I shivered.
I stood and took my place around the fire. All four of us stood there quietly.

How had he known? He'd confirmed my decision. Suddenly it was as if I saw myself
marching with thousands of others and speaking to crowds and writing works that
transformed nations and sent all bakers home from the battlefields.

"I charge you," Uncle Harold said, "to call together the young of the family
when they are of age to knight them in their turn."

They'd planned this, I suddenly knew -- my mother and my aunt and uncle. This
was why I had had to come to England. I did not question, then, whether Uncle
Harold's history of our family was true. Facts did not matter to me at that
time: I wanted his story to he true. I suddenly wanted the sword to be Ex
Calibur; the round table in the dining room, if not the original, at least
patterned after it; and all the dark paneling truly from the sunken forests of
Lyonnesse.

"Gather your banners!" Uncle Harold cried, and we scrambled into the rocks after
them. I felt closer to Emily and Clayton then, different from the way I'd felt
about them before: from that day on we were more than family; we were knights on
a quest together. I could sense the beauty and adventure and hope we would each
bring into the world before we had done it.

Uncle Harold led us back through the darkness, guided only by moonlight, through
the orchards of apples so fragrant in the night. For the first time in England I
remembered my mother's stories of Avalon and its apple orchards, and I shivered
again and looked at the moonlight gleaming on the blade of the sword my uncle
held. I lifted my banner higher, then, at the sight of it, for Emily and Clayton
and I brought along with us our dreams now, bright and alive in us, and all our
banners flying.