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"??/???? ??i?? />??/>z" p??z???:
RED-005.TXT aka
"Bastard"
by: Archangel
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It's raining. The delicate drops pound my armor as I sit astride my
chestnut-colored gelding. The sound is of a pot clanging as it catches the
drips falling to the floor through a leaking roof.
Although I am proud of my armor, I'm not very fond of it. To be sure it
is impressive with it's burnished steel breastplate, brass mail undertunic,
and steel gauntlets (although I'm wearing my leather riding gloves right now),
but it's heavy and uncomfortable. This is not a peasant's cheap, homemade,
padded armor. This is the armor of a nobleman... and I am a nobleman. My
mount has been bred to perfection, finer than the Grand Duke's... even though
I am merely the son of a duke. Or, so I believed.
As I sit astride my horse, staring at the humble cottage twenty yards in
front of me, I take in the details of the house. It is a peasant's dwelling.
It has a poorly thatched roof and windows partially covered with old, waxed
parchment. The wood is rotting and the door is cracked and in need of
replacing. This, I had found, is my true parent's house.
Fifteen years earlier, the inhabitants of this cottage had found a
nobleman lying in a muddy ditch with his dead horse lying beside him, an arrow
through its throat. The blood from the horse's neck and from the deep sword
wound in the man's side mingled with the rain that was streaming down from
the sky to swirl in miniature, red whirlpools around the man's head. He was
still alive, but barely.
The peasant brought him back to the cottage. The peasant's wife treated
the nobleman's sword wounds for a fortnight and he gradually healed.
After some time the man was able to move around. He told his caretakers
he was a duke and wished to repay them for their kindness. His wife was
barren and would bear no children. He offered to raise their infant son as a
nobleman. The boy would, one day, succeed him as Duke. The couple was
reluctant, yet they thought of the boy's welfare and agreed.
I grew up thinking I was of noble blood, despite the obvious differences
between my father and me. I thought I was better than the lowly peasants who
groveled on the side of the road as we rode by. They're such animals.
Everything was fine until two weeks before today, my sixteenth birthday.
A peasant was at the castle during one of the Duke's weekly
"complainings" (hearings in the Duke's public hall at which the peasants
would deliver even their most mundane complaints). She had gnarled, old
hands after her hard years as a midwife.
I was standing at my usual place, behind and to the right of the sitting
Duke, with my hands folded in front of me. She came forward to speak of the
need for an animal doctor in her village, the same village where I was born
(the pigs had some sort of infection in their hooves). As she stepped up to
the rounded dais, she stopped in mid-step and stared at the diamond-shaped
birthmark on the back of my hand.
"The mark of diamonds!" she cried. "You are not the Duke's bastard!"
"My what?! Watch your tongue, midwife or," the Duke began to say.
Oblivious to the dangerous mood she'd set my father in, the midwife
screamed, "You're Goodman Cedric's missing son! That mark has been in his
family for generations! I delivered you from your mother to your father's
arms myself!"
"Please woman, you are raving," said the Duke.
"No, it's true I tell you!" the midwife yelled. Voices raised in alarm
throughout the hall....
That's how I got here. Sitting on my horse in all my regal splendor and
staring through the pouring rain at a peasant's cottage. I dismount and walk
to the cracked and moldy door.
Time to meet my mother.
- Archangel -
ReD