by Whyte, Jack
By mid-afternoon, my hands were sore and bleeding, my nails broken and splintered, and every muscle in my arms, back and legs felt as though it was being torn into shreds. But time passed with no respite other than a cup of water at the end of every trip to the walls, and eventually the sun began to sink towards the horizon. Twice I fell to my knees under the weight of individual stones, and both times was convinced that I could not rise up again. But the guard set over me was unyielding. He carried a supple length of willow, peeled and cut to leave only a grip for his hand, and he stood over me, counting aloud as I knelt in exhaustion, and with every fifth count he lashed me with the wand. He was not vicious, not malevolent, but merely dutiful; he took no pleasure out of whipping me, but neither had he any pity. His arm rose and fell mechanically, and its remorselessness inspired me to find wells of energy inside my aching body that I might not else have known existed. Both times I rose up and continued my punishment.
Long before the middle of the afternoon crawled around, however, I had sworn an oath to all the gods in the universe that I would never let myself be consigned here again; not as a boy, and not as a man. Nothing, I had decided, no fleeting self-indulgence, even the most sublime, could be worth this much agony and misery. And yet I knew that we four were escaping lightly. We were but boys and the stones we were made to carry were boy-sized, back- breaking though they were. The men who labored there fared far worse, and they were committed to weeks, months and sometimes years of punishment. The rocks they carried were enormous, and they were forced to make two trips before receiving water.
"Stop."
It took me several moments to realize that my guard was speaking to me. I stopped, hugging the stone to my chest, heaving and hitching it higher, trying to gain a better grip on it.
"Drop it," he said. "You're being summoned."
Too dazed and tired to feel any elation, I opened my arms and let the stone fall to my feet. It landed with a heavy thump and I stood for a moment looking down at it, aware again, as I had been at the end of every trip to the masons' area, that my hands and arms seemed unaware of being freed of their burden. The throbbing ache in them was too bone-deep to permit any instant relaxation at the mere dropping of a stone. I glanced up then to see Stegus, the guard commander, heading towards me, the speed of his walk lifting the material of his long cloak so that it seemed to float about him rather than hang from his shoulders. I tried to stand straighter as I waited for him, but my shoulders felt as though they might be permanently bowed.
Stegus came directly to me, and nodded to my guard. "I'll take him now. See to the release of the other three and then go back to what you should be doing today." The guard snapped him a salute, turned smartly on his heel and marched away.
I knew Stegus well, and liked him, for he often supervised my training at times when Chulderic had other tasks to perform, but there was no trace now of the easygoing officer with whom I was used to dealing. His face and eyes expressionless, he looked me over from head to foot, taking in the condition of my filthy, torn clothing, and his gaze lingered very briefly on my bloody dirt-crusted hands. He offered me no recognition, no acknowledgment that he even knew my name.
"King Ban wants you. Come."
As I trudged behind him, fighting to keep my back straight and wanting only to fall down and cry like a baby, the misery of my day deepened and grew more malevolent. Now I had to face my father, something I had not anticipated. As angry as Chulderic had been, I still had not thought he would tell my father about my disgrace. Now it was obvious that he had, and considering the truth of that, I realized that it had been inevitable from the start and cursed myself for a fool for believing, for even one moment, that it might not be. Chulderic, as my father's Master-at-Arms, had condemned me to the stones for a day, and I was the King's son. Impossible for him to conceal that, or his reasons for doing it, from the King.
I walked in a daze, scarcely aware of my surroundings as we passed through the castle gates, crossed the main yard and entered the central fortress. Only the flickering of torches and the echo of Stegus's iron-shod boots on the flagged floor of the passageway to my father's duty quarters brought me back to reality.
"Come," my father's voice boomed in response to Stegus's knock on his door. Stegus leaned on the handle and swung one of the heavy, iron-studded doors open until he could lean inside.
"Your son is here, Sir."
"Thank you, Stegus."
Stegus held the door open for me while I stepped across the threshold, and then he closed it quietly behind me, leaving me alone with my father, King Ban of Benwick.
3
As usual, the first thing I noticed was the chill. It was always cold in my father's day quarters, even at the height of summer, because they lay at the north end of the central stone-walled building of the fort and had large, open windows with high arches, set with a heavy iron grille, that looked out onto a walled garden. The windows had shutters, both internal and external, with wooden slats that could be closed against foul weather, but I had never known them to be closed. On this occasion I did not even look at the windows. I had eyes only for my father's shape, outlined against the brightness beyond them.
He was standing behind the enormous wooden table he used as a desk, gazing down at a wide, unrolled parchment that was held open on one side by his sheathed dagger and on the other by a heavy, squat ink horn mounted on a carved ivory base. His bronze and iron helmet, crested with tightly packed short, prickly dark brown horsehair, sat by his right hand, and his plain brown cloak lay beside it, casually folded and thrown where he had dropped it. A row of high-backed Roman chairs of the type known as stellae faced the table, their backs to me. On the far side, where he stood, there was only his massive armed chair of black and ancient oak, carved over every point of its surface.
I stood motionless and waited for him to take notice of me. He was engrossed in whatever he was working on, however, and paid me no attention at all for a long time, and as I waited I felt my initial fear abating. I had no fear of him as my father, none at all, but I knew I had earned the punishment I had endured thus far that day and I expected more to come. Patience and tolerance my father had in abundance, but when discipline was called for he could be ferocious and unsparing. Looking at him now, when he was unaware of being watched, I saw that the light behind him made him appear different, in some subtle fashion, older than I had thought him. In fact I did not know how old my father was, but I knew he was much older than my mother, Vivienne of Ganis, for his firstborn son, Gunthar, had been born out of wedlock to a different mother, who had died birthing the boy years before Ban and Vivienne of Ganis ever met. My mother, who had given him four sons—Samson, Theuderic, Brach and me—was, in effect, his second wife. It was perhaps that difference that made it easy for the four of us who were Vivienne's sons to believe that our half-brother, Gunthar, was both mad and dangerous, but then, we were all mere boys and Gunthar was a disapproving and unfriendly elder who also happened to be a sibling, so we felt justified in regarding him as both alien and inimical.
The light shining in on my father from the windows behind him outlined the deep, vertical scar on the left side of his face where a hard-swung sword had almost cloven his skull in some long-past fight but had glanced down the side of his head instead, trenching his face and separating the flesh of it from the underlying bone, so that even his skilled surgeons had been unable to repair the damage. His hair, iron gray, was cut short, close to his scalp, in what I had heard called the warrior's crop, and he was wearing his standard, daily armour, a sculpted cuirass of layered, hammered, highly polished bullhide embossed with broad bronze rosettes on his breast and a delicate tracery of bronze inlay outlining the abdominal muscles beneath. Heavy, armoured epaulettes protected his shoulders, and from waist to ankles he wore breeches of soft, supple, carefully tanned leather. Over those, he was still wearing his armoured leggings, which meant that he had not long since come in from riding, for the leggings were heavy and cum
bersome things to wear when not on horseback.
My father was proud of his leggings, because they were an innovation that he had designed himself, years earlier and in cooperation with a few of his friends, after the cataphractus, the heavy, armoured blanket developed by the Romans to protect their horses against weapons and projectiles. The cataphractus had worked so well as a protective device that riders had soon begun adapting its design to protect themselves in the saddle, reshaping and extending the blanket so that one flap of it could cover their legs. My father had taken the adaptation one step further, fashioning a kind of divided skirt that covered him from waist to ankle, separate from the cataphractus itself but serving the same purpose for the rider that the armoured blanket served for the horse he rode. The resultant leggings were little more than hanging flaps of ring mail, leather panels held in place by a thick belt and encrusted with thousands upon thousands of tiny rings of bronze, sewn to overlap each other thickly enough to deflect a sword blade or a spear point, but they could be laced at knee and ankle to wrap around and cover the vulnerable parts of a rider's legs. It was obvious to me that before I entered his quarters that day he had already started to remove his leggings, for the laces at both knees and ankles hung free, and the belt tongue threaded through the heavy bronze buckle at his waist had been pulled through on one side, then left hanging. He had removed his scabbarded sword belt, too—it was worn over the belted leggings—and hooked it over the back of his chair.
As I watched him, thinking he had already lost awareness of my being there, he crossed one arm in front of his chest to support the other, drew back his upper lip in a rictus of frowning thought, and began to tap the back of one fingernail against his upper teeth. The sound of it carried clearly to me, and I listened as the tempo of his tapping increased, then stopped. He sniffed sharply, then sighed and looked up at me, sweeping me from head to toe with his eyes before turning away to gaze out of the window.
"You look like a casualty. Mud, blood and crusted dirt. Your mother's going to be very pleased with you."
I gazed at his back, unsure whether to speak and trying to gauge how angry he was with me. He hadn't sounded angry. But before I could respond he spoke again, still facing the garden.
"You're ten years old now, boy, more than halfway to manhood and big for your age. Do you think you'll ever make a decent man?" He didn't wait for a reply this time, but swung back to face me. "Chulderic thought you would, until today, but now he's not so sure. And from what he has told me, I have to wonder, too." He gazed at me for three long, pounding heartbeats, then closed his eyes, leaving his face expressionless. "Now tell me, do I need to wonder? What happened out there?"
My face was crimson, my chest crushed with shame.
"I got into a fight."
He opened his eyes wide and raised one eyebrow high. I did not know the word sardonic at the time, but I recognized the expression on his face.
"I know that. You against three others, bigger and older than you. You won. That's not what worries Chulderic. He's the one who taught you to fight, and he might have been proud of you. But he tells me that when everything was over, and you had thrashed all three of them, you went wild and tried to kill the biggest one. Frotto, is it?"
When I nodded, he frowned. "Aye. Well, Chulderic is my Master-at-Arms, and a fighter born and bred, not some terrified old woman. He says you stopped, stepped back, chased off the other two and then went after the big one again, even though there was no fight left in the fellow. Chulderic believes you were trying to kill him. He says he yelled at you and you ignored him. He says that if he hadn't torn you away and thrown you down you would have smashed the boy's head in. So you tell me, now, the truth. Is Chulderic lying?"
I shook my head, trying to swallow the lump in my throat and blinking my eyes fiercely to stem the tears that threatened to spill out of me. "No," I whispered, almost choking as I tried to speak. "But I wasn't trying to kill him . . . I only wanted to beat him badly, to teach him a lesson."
My father's eyes narrowed to slits. "Why? And what lesson?"
'To keep his big mouth shut and stop telling those lies about me."
"What lies?"
I was crying openly now, the hurt spewing out of me. "The same ones he always tells. Every time I meet him he tells all his friends that I'm not really who I am. He tells them you're not my real father, and that my real mother was a—was a faithless whore who left me and my father when I was a baby to run away with another man. He says his mother says that you and Mother took me in out of pity, and he says anyone can tell, just by looking at Gunthar and Samson and Theuderic and Brach, that I'm not their brother. I hate him and he's always lying and I wanted to make him stop, to make him afraid of me so that he would stop."
I squeezed my eyes shut, scrubbing at my face with my sleeves to dry my tears, and when I opened them I saw my father frowning at me in stupefaction.
"How long has this been going on?"
I knew then that my mother had never mentioned the first incident to him, and young as I was, something inside me shrank and withered. "For a long time. Since I was seven."
"Three years? Why haven't you told me this before?"
What could I say to that? I knew that if I spoke the truth my mother would have to answer for it, and in my confusion, wondering myself why she had said nothing to him, I could think of nothing else to say. He was glowering deeply now. "Answer me, boy. Why didn't you come to me?"
"I. . ." And suddenly the answer sprang to my lips, along with the knowledge that I could protect my mother. "You told me not to," I said, and saw his eyes widen. "When I told you about Ector stealing my knife you were angry at me. You told me that you had more to think about than silly boys' squabbles and said if I came running to you every time someone did something to me that I didn't like, I would never grow up."
He gazed at me for a long time, his lips moving together soundlessly as though he were nibbling something, and then he drew himself erect and breathed out through his nose.
"That's true, I did, didn't I. But that was a long time ago. You were, what, six at the time? And I had a fresh war on my hands. That very day you came crying to me over your stolen knife, as I recall, I had just received word that an entire unit of my men had been ambushed and wiped out by marauders, less than ten miles from here." His hands moved to the heavy buckle at his waist and he undid the belt of his leggings, folding them over one arm and dropping them heavily over the back of his chair, beside his sword belt. "But at six, I suppose you would have been too young to know anything about the seriousness of that. You saw your own problem that day as the most serious one in the world, and I barked at you like an angry dog and sent you off to resolve it by yourself. And you've never brought me another problem since, have you? Not until now."
He walked to the window again and stood staring out at the garden, clasping his hands behind his back. "I need to think about this, but I'll tell Chulderic he need have no fears about your savagery—that you did what you did for good reason—good enough to satisfy me, at least. Leave me now. Go to the bath house and clean yourself up. Tell Lorio I want him to look at your injuries. I'll have someone bring you fresh clothes. And we'll say nothing to your mother about your punishment today. When you're presentable again, come back here." He turned back to face me. "Show me your hands."
I went to him and did as he had asked. He took one of my hands in each of his own, turning them over to inspect my swollen fingers and mangled nails. When he was satisfied, he grunted and released me. "Well, they're not permanently damaged, but you'd better be sure to have Lorio bandage those two fingers on your left hand. I imagine that's all he'll be able to do for you, other than to rub in some liniment. The bruising will go away and the nails will grow back, but you're going to be sore for a few days. I think that, and the punishment you've already undergone, will be sufficient for the sins you've committed. What about Frotto?"
I blinked at him. "Frotto? What about him, Father?"
&nb
sp; "What am I to do with him and his friends? Do you want me to have them whipped?"
"No!" I surprised myself with my vehemence and with the realization that I was no longer angry with Frotto. "No, if you please. Let them go."
"I already have, but I could bring them back and have them flogged. Are you sure you want to let this quarrel end that simply?"
"Yes, Father."
He shrugged, but I could tell he was pleased with me for some reason. "As you wish. We'll say no more about it. Do you think you frightened him enough to make him stop baiting you?"
I frowned. "Perhaps not, but I think Chulderic did."
My father's face broke into the wide-mouthed smile I loved. "Aye," he said, "I believe you might be right about that. Off with you now, and see Lorio, but waste no time. Come back here as soon as you're clean and dressed again."
4
How easy it is for us to delude ourselves in matters we simply do not want to confront. Thinking back on that afternoon—and it is a scene I have revisited countless times—I am constantly astounded by my own lack of perception. Of course, I was only ten years old, no matter how grown up and worldly I believed myself to be, and yet it has often seemed to me that the mindless relief with which I sought my freedom, scampering off to the bath house to be tended to and fussed over by Lorio, would have been unchanged had I been twice the age I was.
I threw myself into the task of washing away all signs of my misadventures that day, accepting the stinging pain of hot water on my bruises and injuries as an easily bearable penance. When I was clean and dried, Lorio massaged my aching hands, then smeared them with unguents and bound them carefully in clean, bright, white bandages of boiled linen. I was appalled by that clean brightness, for the sight of it filled my mind immediately with the impossibility of concealing the bandages from my mother. She would immediately want to know what I had done to myself. The fact that my father had told me we would say nothing to her about my escapades that day became meaningless. Neither of us, I knew, could lie to her, for my father's celebrated courage and heroism were all confined to what he did in battle. Even at ten, I knew they counted for naught in his own household whenever he clashed with his wife. My father would tell her the truth, and she would be angry.
