Ethelwyn walks out on the bridge

Princess Britamund had been born on the day after the feast of Saint Laurence. The birthday season therefore coincided with the time when the night sky sparkled with the falling stars that were said to be the saint’s tears. One week after his feast, Saint Laurence was still crying, though it seemed that his eyes were finally beginning to run dry.

Ethelwyn was not, so far as he knew, a man who cried. Surely a crying man would have shed a tear or two by now. He had been a stranger to his own life for a month and a half, and the knowledge that there were thirty-​​one years of memory missing made him feel hollow and unreal among the other men, like a bubble floating over a field of stones.

He was getting to know these people, but it was little comfort to him. It made him feel emptier to like them than to not. They met him as the man he used to be, but he was not that man, and so he felt himself a fraud.

He often wondered what that man would have said about the way he had been handling his body for the last month and a half. He particularly wondered what he would say about the way he had been treating his friends. That man had loved these people, he thought, and it almost shamed him to presume to take his place among them.

Ethelwyn scarcely knew that man, though he was in some ways like a shadowy twin. When he shaved, his thumb fell precisely into the groove the other man’s thumb had worn on the handle of his razor. The collars of his shirts were already stretched out of shape on the right side to make room for the fingers he slipped underneath to rub his collarbone when he was thoughtful.

But what did that man think when he rubbed his collarbone? There were no paths worn through this mind he had inherited. It had all grown into an impenetrable thicket in the space of one week of madness and sleep.

Ethelwyn beat forward, clearing his own paths, but he never found more than a few tantalizing clues, like fragmentary artifacts of a lost race. Here among the brambles he would find a crimson flower, and there, caught in the thorns, a scrap of cloth torn from the hem of a woman’s dress. But even if he laid it all as bare as a meadow cleared by fire, he did not think he could reconstruct a man’s life from these fragments.

He learned more from the people who had known the man. They could not tell him what he had thought, either, but they knew what sort of man he had been. Either intentionally or accidentally they had taught him that he used to be rather vain and silly, pompous, long-​​winded when he got to talking, and absurdly sensitive about certain trivialities. He was an excellent manager, but business-​​like to a fault, and it appeared that the farmers used to dread his arrival.

At times he even wondered why and how he had any friends at all. It was a strange thing to have the feeling that his friends liked him better when he was not himself. It was strange also to feel such loyalty to this man he had once been but had never known – to want to defend him, but to lack the means to do so. He could not say in defense of his old self: “But I was also…” He did not know what he had also been.

“Don’t fall in!”

Ethelwyn stood. He had been leaning over the wall of the bridge for some time now, staring down into the moat. For some time he had been watching the Tears of Saint Laurence fall in the reflected sky and wondering whether the man he had been would have cried any of his own.

One of the guards had stepped out of the guardhouse to grin at him.

“It might help if I did,” he called back.

“That it might!” the guard laughed. “You ought to get Mouse down here and try.”

“It won’t be the same without little boys to laugh at me, too.”

“You might schedule an attempt tomorrow when everyone is awake.”

“I might!”

He and the guard shared a laugh, and then the guard went back inside to his game of dice. Ethelwyn looked back at the moat.

It was not the first time he had thought of jumping in the moat, and the idea had been suggested by others twice as many times.

But Ethelwyn did not truly believe that his memories were locked up behind a door to which he needed only find the key. The scraps and fragments he had recovered suggested that his mind had been laid waste and made desolate, like an iniquitous city before the wrath of God. He might spend all the years of life that remained in this man’s body picking up the pieces, and still he would never know the man.

And what if he did jump into the moat? It was shallow, but not too shallow. The water was far below, but not too far. He thought he could manage it without breaking his neck. He had done it once before.

And what if he did break his neck? What would be lost? A body no longer inhabited by its owner? He was, in a sense, already a ghost. Ethelwyn Ealstan had died a month and a half before. He was only animating the man’s corpse. He had not yet built a new life of his own. There was nothing to lose.

The man’s friends would miss him, but what they truly missed was already long gone. And, as far as he could tell, it was not much to miss anyway.

The wall was low, and Ethelwyn Ealstan had been a tall man. He had only to lean forward, and the weight of his body carried him over. It seemed for one buoyant, liberating moment that he was floating like a bubble – and then he was falling like a star.