“Because I beat the prince to a trophy that the king wanted him to win so much that he named it after him?”
“The prince’s own pet pig, Snuffles, could have beaten him in that trophy.”
“Yes, but it didn’t. I did,” I snap, ignoring the fact that I don’t disagree.
“There is something you must understand about the art of governance,” she says, suddenly changing the subject. Her tone softens to become slightly more conciliatory.
“Why? When will I need to rule? I’ll be dead within a month,” I scoff, catching the petulance only as it leaves my mouth.
“In order to rule effectively, a ruler must be able to manipulate the masses. This is done through a balance of fear and excitement. An effective ruler creates an external fear and an internal excitement. This glues him to the masses. What do you think the external fear is in our case?”
“The snow savages.”
“Correct. And what are the internal excitements?”
“Festivals, tournaments, royal weddings, great heroes.”
“So would the realm prefer its prince to be a great hero? Or a soft, pudgy boy?”
“A great hero.”
“And what does it have?”
“A soft, pudgy boy.”
“Ergo, by winning that tournament, you have denied the realm its excitement. No one is excited about the son of a goatherd.”
“I am sure people will find something else soon,” I sneer.
“That is the hope. You must have noticed that the realm is unhappy. The Kernow are sinking our boats. The mainlanders feel unsafe. Some have started raiding the homes of the others, some are fleeing back to the island. Even on the island, feuds between families grow. The peasants resent their lords, the lords resent the king, the king resents his son. Plots are thickening.”
“That is how it has always been.”
“Not always. For a while, yes, but not always.”
I do not reply.
“Without something to distract the masses, the kingdom will fall apart. Things happen in the king’s shadow that even I do not know.”
“It doesn’t matter to me who rules. As the king said, fish men fish, farm men farm…”
“There are some who might say that the king is an idiot. What if no one rules? What about the snow savages? Who pays the soldiers that defend us from them?”
“But where do I come in? Are you saying these problems would stop if the prince had won?” I almost spit these words out in derision.
“Not in so many words. The prince is as he is. If he had won the tournament, it would only serve to delay the inevitable disappointment. And even so, the prince has many virtues. Men like him become heroes a little later in life. His only concern is whether he’ll ever get the chance.”
“So why am I here?”
“You have a quest.”
Once again, I do not reply.
“I visited Brightstone fourteen years ago and I confess that I do not know whether it still stands. It was, much the way that we are, an empire in great difficulty.”
“An empire?”
“That’s correct. It’s full title is ‘The Sunlit Empire of Brightstone’. It would be possible to translate their word for ‘empire’ as meaning ‘kingdom’ but this would be a simplification. The difference between our kingdom and theirs is that Brightstone is a collection of several island kingdoms all ruled by one leader.” She talks with the same knowledge and authority that one might expect of a talking book.
“So why are you unsure if it still stands?” I reply, finding myself more and more drawn in by this conversation. I feel a certain satisfaction in knowing that not many other people will ever hear such things.
“As I’ve said, it is a very old civilisation.”
“But surely those advancements will help it?” As I ask this question, I am greeted by Lady Vesta’s second smile. It is a contemptuous one.
“Advancements will benefit humans for centuries. Not for milennia. All civilisations end. Thousands of years ago, humans had technology that is unthinkable to us now. It didn’t help them. Across millennia, the only thing that keeps humans alive is their resilience, their ability to start again from nothing.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I have studied.”
“You must have had better teachers than I have.”
“You might say that. But we digress. When I left Brightstone, it was shrinking. The snow savages were preparing for invasion. To save themselves, the entire empire seemed to have turned to God.”
“Which god?” I reply, inserting a deliberate insolence into my tone.
“Another interesting question. The religions of our two kingdoms are similar and, in fact, probably derive from the same source. It is a fascinating topic. Similar to our own Christianity, they believe in one God. The morality of the two religions is similar also. They even revere the Cross in the way that we do.”
“So they are Christians as well?”
“No, not as such. When I travelled there, I gifted them with a Bible. I even translated it for them. They rejected it as heresy. The emperor would not hear their religion referred to as Christianity or accept my claims of similarity.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Stranger still… when I was there…” She pauses and looks deep into my eyes, “they were preparing for the Son of God to arrive.”
Before I have even breathed one incredulous breath, she continues, seeming to have read my face.
“You do not believe me. Do you not believe in God?”
“I don’t know. I don’t believe that though. It seems a coincidence that they began to prepare for His arrival shortly after you arrived with a Bible.”
“Precisely. Now tell me, Gruff, do you think I believe in God?”
“I would have said not.”
“But what you or I believe is not important. It is what the masses believe that is important. A son of god who is worshipped by the masses needn’t be the Son of God at all.”
She pauses, as though understanding that the words need time to sink in. A dim understanding flutters somewhere deep inside my brain.
“The primitive mind is superstitious. It doesn’t just believe in God; it needs to believe in God. And if it needs to believe a man is the Son of God, then it will, whether He is real or not. Whether He is an exotic conjuror or the real thing, the effect will be the same: delirium amongst the masses.”
“Amongst the ignorant masses,” I correct, proud of my cynicism.
“What other masses are there?” she replies, straight-faced. “Whether or not this boy is genuine, they can sell him as a saviour. Their civilisation needed a saviour.”
“But who are they to decide?”
“There are two inalienable truths when it comes to the masses. The first is that they consider their neighbours to be monsters. The second is that they must sanctify their own culture. As a leader, the king’s job is to aid them in that delusion. I wouldn’t be sharing this with you if I didn’t think you’d understand.”
To a boy like me, the pragmatism of this woman is as refreshing as the morning air. As cold as it all sounds, it makes sense. She seems to have insight beyond the guff that we are taught in school, and, indeed, the guff we are taught anywhere. The frozen mask that forms her face makes it almost impossible to detect any hint of age; she looks no older than twenty but her wisdom makes her seem at least triple that.
“How does this affect me?”
“I think you already know the answer to that.”
“I think I do. You are asking me, a boy with no experience, to travel to a place that may no longer exist? To fetch a false saviour? In order to help a king who is losing his grasp?”
“That is correct. The only thing better than a false saviour is a false saviour from another land.”
“What if I refuse?”
“Then I must find a less imaginative way to have you killed,” she replies sharply. There is not even a whisper of
levity in her voice.
I have not known fear for a long time. When a boy sleeps on a hillside for five nights of seven, he learns to accept the darkness and what it hides. Yes, it hides danger but not as much as the boy first thinks. In fact, what that boy thinks hides in the darkness will cause him more trouble than anything that actually does. To begin with, he will cry and shiver and jump at every sound but, given time, he will accept that awareness is not the same as fear. He will relax. He will sleep. The hardness of this life, the uselessness of being afraid, has driven fear from me. This is just one of the many favours that my father has done me.
In this moment though, even with all my knowledge, I am still terrified of what lies beyond the snow. A fear of that place, with its coldness, its animals, its savages, is only logical. I shall not go there.
There is nowhere to move but forward. I leap over the desk to attack her without so much as a thought. It is the desperate move of a boy caught between long death and slow death, a boy whose only hope is to escape. I can take her; she is nothing but an advisor.
Before I am even out of my seat, she restrains me with a strength of which I have never felt the like. It is how I imagine it would feel to be bound in tight chains. She is too strong to even consider struggling against. I submit limply, almost ashamed at how quickly it has ended.
“I will release you now. Return to your seat. We are not quite finished,” she says mildly, not even slightly perturbed by the incident. I slide sheepishly from her arms, humbled by her strength.
“I will forgive you that indiscretion. If you had even the slightest chance of overcoming or escaping me, it would have been the wisest thing that you could have done. And I value your ingenuity.” I at once understand that my only real choice is between a fast, certain death here or a slow, lingering one out in the snow.
“For what it is worth, your death would be a loss to the kingdom. I have developed enough respect for you to be straight with you. As I am sure you know, the king wants you dead. Your inclusion on this quest is my suggestion to him. It is a compromise and, for you, it is the only path you may now take on which you are not guaranteed to die.”
Silence.
“I would make the best of it, if I were you. You will leave this island as a hero. The people will cheer you off. You are one of the twelve chosen, you are in esteemed company.”
“Twelve?”
“Yes. We are sending eleven of the best, twelve if we include you.”
“Does the king want them all dead?”
“We are dispatching six pairs in different directions. Your primary quest is to make contact with Brightstone. Your secondary quest is to bring back the Son of God,” she replies, evading the original question.
“How will I know him?”
“His name is Leo.”
Eight
“Wake up, sleepyhead. The day’s half done,” my father whispers with no trace of irony. It is dawn.
I stir softly in the early morning air. The sky, for once, is without rain, rendering the goat’s hide tent under which I’ve slept a wasteful luxury. The ocean below sounds gentle, the seabirds haven’t started yet, and even the goats, foraging in the nearby gorse, do so mutedly. These mellow sounds, the sounds of home, relax me.
I stand up and shake the sleep off, sliding trance-like from my nightclothes into my jerkin. The air outside the tent is moist and close. It might not be raining yet but it will be soon. My father sits on our long, flat rock overlooking the cliff top. This rock is the closest thing we have to a chair. The sea over which he looks is still hiding half of a red sun.
“It’s another shit ‘un. No good for these here goats,” he muses, sucking on a tough strip of cured goat. He does not turn to face me as I approach but simply continues to gaze out to sea. There is a cup of yoghurt waiting for me on the rock.
“Oh the poor goats,” I snap. The man is obsessed.
“Don’t you be feeling sorry for them goats, boy. They dun’t feel sorry for you. Or themselves for ‘at matter.” His leather brown face wrinkles up in fond amusement at this.
“Their life isn’t over though is it, father? They aren’t being sent off to die.” The cruelty of it all is as sour as my yoghurt.
“A course they get sent off t’die. What am I eating?” he chuckles, waving around his puckered piece of goat meat.
“That isn’t the point, Father, and you know it. I’m a human being, not a stupid, stinking goat.”
“Oh, don’t you be getting at the goats just cus you got your horns in a knot. You’re being sent on a great quest. The greatest quest. You’ll ne’er know how proud I am. I mean ‘The Son of God’…” He trails off, unable to complete the sentence.
When I’d first heard the phrase ‘Son of God’ uttered, I was speechless too but, whereas for me it was incredulity, for him it is excitement. My father fears God like most men.
“Father…” I sigh “There is no God. There is no Son of God. And even if there is, I will not live to reach him. They have given me an impossible quest in order that I might be punished without being seen to be.”
My father turns toward me, his sun-beaten face covered in part by his greyish white stubble, and smiles fondly.
“I always thought that reading wer’ impossible. But then you come along and taught yeself. Half the stuff you do, to me, is impossible. It’s you that taught me ‘bout impossible.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, impossible isn’t something that’s true to a thing. It’s something that’s true to the person doing it. Climbing half down the Claw a Lawrenny is impossible to me but a goat will do it as easy as he’ll take a shit. Someone like you will find a way. You’re as stubborn as the stubbornest goat I ever met!”
“Father, you’re a fool. You don’t understand because you don’t understand anything beyond this isle. Our life is hard enough here. Beyond the mountains is nothing but snow and savages and death. I will die out there.”
“Do you remember when you were a nip? You used to say you could push the sky away. Not even that wer’ impossible for you back then!”
“With respect, you’re being irrelevant again, Father.”
“But you were e’en clever in that, weren’t you? How you meant it, it made sense. You meant that if yer working hard, moving fast, ne’er stopping, always trying… that the sun moves faster across the sky. You meant that that the sky moves like you. Ha ha!” he grins toothlessly.
“I’ve heard that story so many times, Father. It’s not even clever. You work harder, time passes quicker.”
That story, for my father, is the story that he bores people with every time he wants to talk of my precocity. I scrape up the last of my yoghurt with my finger and sigh. For a moment, there is silence as we stare out to sea and the emergent red sun.
“You’ll be reet. I promise.” His hard, black eyes seem, for a moment, soft. I don’t answer; I can’t spend my last morning with the man in conflict.
My father, always my hero, his rugged impenetrable exterior, his fierce pride and determination, is becoming frailer and more human by the day. And despite our differences, I understand that it is what he has taught me that has made me who I am. The discipline, the determination, that he has infused into my life has led me to the school and maybe even to the cusp of knighthood. It has also now brought me to the brink of death.
“You’re making it difficult. You can’t make those promises. You don’t know what will happen.”
“I’ve seen it,” he replies knowingly. When my father is not relying on laboured goat metaphors, he is attempting to pass himself off as Ynys Gwyn’s resident mystic. He is aided in this delusion by the fact that there is a general consensus amongst the islanders that if anyone is going to be a mystic, it will be the slightly senile, semi-feral, near naked goatherd who inhabits the wild east of the island. I, however, am not so easily drawn in.
“And that is supposed to make me feel better?”
“Nope. I think you’ve already deci
ded nothing’s gunna make you feel better.”
He chuckles and rises from his resting place on the stone. He moves to offer me a rare hug. His tanned, sinewy body is covered in hair and his sour, salty smell is not the most pleasant but, nevertheless, this hug is the most useful thing he’s done all morning.
“I need to go.”
“So you do.” He releases me from the hug, slapping me on the back as he does so.
“Goodbye, Father.”
“Goodbye, Son. And remember – push the sky away.” We do not say any more; there are no tears, no declarations of love. Men like us do not need to say such things.
Nine
I set off towards Arberth, the location of the bridge to the mainland, lost in thought. Upon receiving the orders from Vesta, my reaction had been a pragmatic one. I could not change the course of events that I had been faced with and so resolved myself to prepare in the best way I could. There is nothing quite so wretched as to fail through lack of preparation.
In some ways, I am lucky. The harshness of a goatherd’s life has prepared me for the wilderness in a way that nothing else could have: the butchery of animals, the preparation of forage, the building of shelters and tolerance to the cold were all things that I didn’t need to learn. And, whilst I understand that the coldness of the island could never compare to the snow and mountains beyond, I have still been taught to respect the cold. As boys go, I feel equipped to fight the elements better than most.
Furthermore, long days with my father have taught me everything I need to know about the sun. It is perhaps the only other subject besides goat husbandry in which he truly excels and, despite what he might claim, the sun is his first god. In exchange for his worship, it has turned his skin into wrinkled leather. Nevertheless, just a casual glance at the sun will tell him the time, the season and his bearing. As with all men who limit their horizons, he is an expert in everything he needs to be.
In accordance with what I already knew, I memorised the map provided by Vesta and studied the sun in the sky. It would be imperative to know which way to walk whatever the time and whatever the weather. I could only hope that my travelling companion, whoever they might be, would be shrewd enough to listen. Even walking south-west towards Arberth, my mind remains fixed on my ultimate destination: Brightstone and the north west.
Tales of the Zodiac - The Goat's Tale Page 5
