The whistle cuts through the drizzle and everyone starts to trot. The prince is allowed to move to the front and everyone seems afraid to run any faster than him. I sprint through the crowd. By my estimation, getting ahead and staying ahead is my only hope. The ankle kicks start as I attempt to move through the crowd but, with the nickname ‘Goat’ ringing loud in my ears, I keep my footing and surge to the front. However, I am not sprinting alone. I turn my head around to realise that I am being followed, or more aptly chased, by Tomos.
Tomos is more a man than any other boy in the class, standing already a clear half metre taller than any except for Cai. With the barrel chest of a brawler, the defined chin of the upper classes and endless supplies of thick black hair, he is a classic highborn boy. As is typical of his kind, he is happily ignorant of the world around him, listens to no one and hates everything outside his four well-furnished walls. Especially me. He screams what sounds like a war cry. At this point, I realise that he is here to remove me from the race.
He is built for power where I am built for endurance and I know that I cannot outsprint him. This does not stop me from trying. His reasons for disliking me are many but not particularly varied. He dislikes the fact that I am of peasant birth, and that I am a better scholar than him and a better athlete. Particularly difficult for him will have been the fact that I even outfought him in the combat rounds of the Prince Libran Cup. It would appear that here, in a race for goats rather than horses, he has decided to sacrifice himself to prevent me from winning.
We travel probably one hundred metres before he is upon me. His rock hard muscle slaps me down to the mud. Pain does not appear instantly – the cold, relentless rain and my hot blood see to that – but I am pinned to the floor by the sheer weight of the boy, sustaining blow after blow to my face and gut. I am vaguely aware of the race passing me by once more but this feels more like a dream.
After what seems an eternity on the floor, I slip from his arm lock and spring to my feet. The only pain I can feel is from the grazes on my naked knees. The rain has soaked us to the skin and his black matted hair covers his eyes. This does not stop him jabbing his fists out, attempting to keep me away from him.
We circle each other whilst the race runs further into the distance. Knowing this burns away at me. My tactics in our tournament fight had been somewhat of a war of attrition: keeping him at arms length, picking at him with fists and kicks, wearing him down whilst his eyes, full of impotent fury, watched on.
Today though, the rain obscures those eyes and he is as hard to hit as a shadow in the fog. We circle in the greyness, I, impatient to re-join the race and, he, fixed on not letting me. This fight cannot be a war of attrition: if I am slow and tactical with him then he has won. The race, and the Prince Libran Cup, is running from me even now. The realisation of this sends me firing forth towards him. The filth of the weather, I sense, gives me more of an advantage than I’d have normally. His hefty, sluggish frame and witless eyes must be more lost than mine.
I avoid his fist and dive foot first into his leg, as though to focus all the power of my body in a kick to his planted knee. The effect is immediate, the scream so pained that it would horrify anyone strange enough to be out walking through this fog. He falls backwards and instinct tells me to jump on him and beat him as he was, only moments before, beating me. But I don’t. In fact, I don’t even stop to think about it, to see his ugly face twisting in pain or even to ensure that he is adequately injured. I just start running again.
Four
The royal island of Ynys Gwyn must be at least forty kilometres in circumference. But it is not the distance that is the challenge. The coastal undulations, especially on the northern side where the race starts, would add at least another eight kilometres to an equivalent flat race. The school lies on the fringes of Dref Libran, a coastal town situated about half way along the north coast. Here, the sea is not only to the north but also to the east, courtesy of a huge inlet that ventures across almost half the island.
We are to race eastward, and this means that the first quarter of the race takes us through the wildest part of the island, the part known as ‘the green’. These are the trampling grounds of my father’s flock, awkward hills and hillocks covered by nothing but gorse, bare earth fed by nothing but salt spray and relentless wind. Where there is track, it is wide enough for one person only, and it is some consolation to me that I will not catch anyone up to overtake until I am through this portion. Thorns and nettles litter the path, destined to rip my exposed feet to shreds. Even in the summer, with spindly white clouds floating in wonderful blue, this place is exposed and hostile. In the winter, it will kill you. There is also another, smaller inlet to contend with here. A detour of at least a kilometre to circumvent a gap that could be jumped by a particularly athletic sixteen-year-old boy. The prince will not dare.
Then there is the possibility of cutting out the entire north-eastern corner of the island altogether. The claw of Lawrenny is an exposed, scrub-covered headland connected to the island only by its scraggy neck. The temptation to run straight across this neck will be reined in only by the presence of a schoolmaster.
After this, it will be a run through the fishing villages that dot the southern coastline. These stinking, rickety villages will be lined with stinking, rickety fisherfolk all ready to hurl insults at the boys that run past. The people of these villages are renowned for their mean spirits. I, for one, don’t blame them; to spend one’s life rising at dawn, smelling of fish, frozen by the sea, catching fish, returning home to eat fish, sleeping beside a woman who looks and smells like a fish, is a life that would justifiably make any man miserable.
The fishing villages increase in density as they approach Arberth, one of the two major settlements on the island. Arberth, for the inhabitants of this wild isle, is the gateway to the mainland: a stone behemoth rising from the mud and grass. We will not run inside the town but around its stone walls and the headland it encloses. A town for guards, fishermen and drunks, where people perpetually behave as though it is night time, Arberth is not a place that the young boys of the Prince Libran School should see.
Leaving Arberth, we shall be about halfway around the southern coast, probably less than two kilometres south of where we started on this island, which, on a map, would look long and flat. The next sixteen kilometres will be more of the same undulating track, taking us down through gorse bushes, shale-covered beaches and back up to exposed cliff tops. There will be some fishing huts, but not so many, and, for long portions, there will be nothing but the wind and its monstrous seagulls to worry us.
The finishing straight will take us into the royal city of Tallakarn. The cobbled streets of the capital will be where the parents of the boys, the teachers and most of the rest of the school will be waiting. My father, of course, will not be there. Those goats will not tend themselves.
I float through the race with scarce a conscious thought. My naked feet pass through pain into numbness and, one by one, I overtake almost every other boy in the race. Although I am the subject of much scorn amongst my colleagues, there is not another one of them who would dare try to stop me winning. As with most bullies, they are physical and emotional cowards and must sate themselves with only hurting the weak. Unfortunately for them, a lifetime of living wild on the hillsides has made me anything but weak and, as such, they are restricted to simple name-calling and ostracism.
I count each boy I pass and, as I move past Dafydd into third place, the identity of the top two are not exactly a surprise to me. I don’t need to see them to know. I wouldn’t even need to know every other boy that I’d passed to work it out; it was always inevitable. The race is being led by the prince and his cousin, Cai, also known as ‘The Golden Arrow”. The fact that he is already known across the entire kingdom by this epithet tells its own story; he is perhaps the greatest natural athlete in the class and already renowned as a precocious swordsman and archer. In both the fencing tournament and the archery, he came up
against Prince Libran in the semi-finals and conceded both in two shameless acts of sycophancy. For this I was thankful, as he could have diced me, or anyone else in the competition, into pieces if he had wished. It must have only been after these oversights that the school masters began to stack the draw against me.
As it is though, instead of challenging me for the cup himself, as he surely could, he finds himself a mere stalking horse for his podgy little cousin. Even now, at an unidentified distance behind them, I have no doubt that the two will be running in twain, with Cai managing both the pace and the morale of the prince, all the while getting ready to gallantly step aside at the last moment. In reality then, it is him I must catch.
Five
A further twelve kilometres pass and I still have no sight of them. I try to console myself that the fog will have, at the very least, quartered my vision. But the fog is rising and the clouds have begun to tentatively part, releasing mild shafts of bright winter light onto the track ahead. This sight, which some would consider beautiful, reminds me of only one fact – that I cannot see the prince. A niggling feeling grows deep in the pit of my stomach. It is a niggle that hurts more than the cold on my ears or the blisters on my feet. It is the realisation that the prince has cheated.
Gradually, the pieces form to make perfect sense. The weather, the long, winding route that cannot possibly be monitored (or, even if it were monitored, would be monitored by people who could be bribed) seem to make this an ideal time to cheat. The prince could be being chauffeured around the island on horse and cart. He might have cut half the island out of his running route. The more that the thought crosses my mind, the more I am plagued by it. The idea has turned from a niggle into a certainty. Indeed, I struggle to think of a single reason why he wouldn’t do it. All I have is the hope that the prince is as decent a boy as I believe him to be.
It is only now, ascending a small hillock, with this poisoned thought inside my head, that I realise how tired I am. The clouds may be splitting but the greyness around still seems to pervade. An overwhelming pessimism, even more acute than usual, washes over me. What is the point? I have been cheated at every turn, my legs are heavy as iron, my feet bloodied stumps, and this hill grows steeper with every step I take. Why should I torture myself if it is only to lose?
In this instant, it becomes quite clear the way that the world is. Life is nothing but a meaningless procession towards death. Everybody tramples down on those below them. The king gets what the king wants. He could erase my father and me from history as easily as I can erase a midge. Fighting him, them, the institution, is like a rabbit trying to fight its way out of a trap. There is no point.
Then, just like that, I catch sight of my own weakness and spit it out on the ground. I will not submit like the rest of them. It is one thing to fail but quite another to fail through lack of effort. Until these heavy legs can lift these bloodied feet no more, I shall continue to put one in front of the other. The hill, which just moments before had seemed to be a wall, becomes just another obstacle to crush.
I reach the crest of the hill, teeth gritted, furious with the world. But the rain has broken and life seems a little less grey. The first thing I see is the city of Tallakarn and, majestic in the distance, the white towers of the palace. The second thing I see is two tiny grey dots approximately halfway between me and the great city. The race is on.
The competitive spirit rages so strong in a boy like me that, all of a sudden, it is as though my body has reset. Everything becomes easier now, my stride lengthens and my pace quickens. I will catch them.
The prince and his athletic cousin have not cheated. Or if they have, then they have returned to the track for the final few kilometres. Even from way off in the distance, I can picture the scene: Cai, at an effortless canter, looking on as the prince, puffing and red-faced, stumbles forward. I can imagine the protestations of the prince, his lack of self belief, theatrically moaning that he cannot possibly go on.
The beauty of this scenario is that, as a pair, they are only as strong as their weakest link. I know with certainty that Cai will not allow himself to beat the prince. For him, chivalry and honour are impulses that are far too strong. And, even if he did decide to win the race for himself, I’d still only have to beat the prince and finish second in order to win the trophy.
Another consideration that flashes through my mind is that Cai will attempt to physically thwart me in the manner that Tomos did at the start of the race. This eventuality does not concern me greatly; I am reasonably convinced that Cai is not of that nature. He is a strong, athletic boy but never a bully. In fact he is the kind of boy who fights bullies - a true, chivalric knight if ever there was one. Furthermore, I am not scared of him without his sword and bow.
With every moment that passes, they become larger. Neither has turned their head as of yet and I wonder if this is through exhaustion or complacency. Do they know what Tomos was supposed to do to me? Do they know what, in fact, I have done to Tomos? A flush of hot blood pumps through me as I recall the boy incapacitated on the ground, leg presumably shattered. God only knows what has happened to him now. He has learned a difficult lesson.
I must be moving two or three times faster than them at this point and, whilst this speed is partly aided by my descent of the hill, it is still fast enough that I shall be well ahead of them by the time they reach Tallakarn and the sweet embrace of the finish line.
It is hard to accurately describe my feelings as I hurtle towards them, my body possessed by an almost supernatural numbness. Almost every pain in my body – my battle bruises, my heaving chest, my shredded feet – register to me as nothing but points of interest. I know they are there but I do not feel them. My reaction to them is that of a neutral observer.
Cai looks round twice before he seems to realise. The distance and the dismal sky mean that I cannot yet make out his expression, but I should imagine that it is one of panic, the sensation of realising only too late that you are standing in the firing line of a charging billy goat. He knows as well as I do that the prince will not have the energy to increase his pace and, what is worse, he will not have the stomach to even try. I hear Cai shout to him.
The prince looks round and, whilst I cannot see his face, I can see his head drop. He stumbles. The boy is too nice, too concerned, to be a competitor. I would imagine that, upon seeing me, his response would be only to doubt himself and slow down further. It seems clear to me in this instant that this is the difference between the two of us. If I had seen someone rapidly catching me, my only response would have been to grit my teeth and run faster. When someone like me is chasing someone like him, there will only ever be one winner.
Six
I have only stood on the red rug of this royal reception room twice. And both times have been as a winner. The atmosphere this time, though, is markedly different to the first. I can’t imagine why.
The first time I was invited for an audience with the king, it was as a winner of The Prince Libran Scholarship. This scholarship is, as the name suggests, the right to study at the Prince Libran School. This establishment is where the sons of all the most important people in the land are educated, indoctrinated and prepared, at the very least, for the life of a landholder. The scholarship, meanwhile, provides this same opportunity to twelve children who are not the sons of the most important people in the kingdom. The desire to educate children from all walks of life is also demonstrated in the school’s motto: “Serving the best so that the best shall serve.”
Initially, the scholarships and the social conscience that they imply won the king much support from the peasants. However, this same support is not to be found inside the iron gates of the school. There, elitism pervades and the lucky scholars soon find themselves surrounded by people - masters and students - who have been raised to fear the poor, who treat them with a mixture of disgust and disdain, at best to be avoided and at worst to be exterminated. Few within the school actually live by the school’s motto, bullying i
s rife and, as a result, the scholarship winners’ numbers slowly dwindle. Only the most stubborn remain, alienated from old friends and ostracised by the new.
Five years ago when we twelve lucky peasants were invited to see the king, this same room seemed smaller than it is now, bustling with proud parents, busy attendants and schoolmasters. The long, dark oak table that now stands barren was, that day, so full of beige food as to be almost grotesque. It seemed a sickening waste. Some amongst us, especially the ones who’d been raised solely on goat produce, had not even contemplated food of this ilk before: breads and cakes and pies stacked higher and decorated more elaborately than could ever be necessary.
Accompanying the food was more music and mirth than a boy such as I could ever be completely comfortable with. Jugglers, jesters, troubadours all lined up one after another to display rare skills that seemed to be of even rarer usefulness. Singers and poets were there to sing praise to the king, and I was even introduced to the strange custom of throat singing. Throat singing hadn’t been the only odd, highborn custom that I’d come across that day; the air was stained with the smoky perfume of burning flowers whilst the legendary knight, Ser Torryan, The Bull, demonstrated quite a skill for weightlifting. It was, all in all, an afternoon of colour and noise and excitement. Very different to today.
On that day, even the fat king did not appear entirely uninterested, managing to say something that was vaguely encouraging and to produce a few smiles that were not obviously fake. Meanwhile, our new headmaster squirted some congratulatory words out of the side of his face and the high priest, somewhat predictably, suggested that we should thank God for something. However, amongst this general insipidness, there was one much more telling speech – the cold, hard one barked out by the king’s advisor, Vesta. It would be the one that would turn out to most accurately describe the experience that awaited us naïve young peasants.
Tales of the Zodiac - The Goat's Tale Page 3
