CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
The duchy where I was born is called Pertine. It is a small and simple place, largely ignored by the rest of Tristia. The word ‘pertine’ has a number of different meanings, but they all come from the flower that grows on the leeward slopes of the mountain ranges that ring the region. It is an odd sort of bluish colour, and you would call it bright at first, but then as you looked on it further, you’d find yourself adding words like ‘oily’ and ‘runny-looking’ and finally ‘sort of disturbing’. The pertine has no known medicinal properties, it makes you sick if you eat it and it smells horrible once plucked from the ground. Needless to say, you’d have to be pretty stupid to make it the one thing people remember about your region. However, somewhere in the distant past, some warlord decided to pick one of these flowers, put it on his cloak and name this land of my birth ‘Pertine’. I imagine he was born without a sense of smell.
But the folly continues. The guardsmen who watch over the town and comprise our troops in times of war wear tabards of the same colour and general consistency as the flowers that grace our homeland, which inevitably means they are dubbed ‘the Pertines’ – because they are, after all, blue, oily, runny-looking and ultimately quite stinky.
I was born to this rich heritage as my father had chosen not only to live in Pertine but also to serve in the Pertine Guard. He wasn’t a very good father to me, nor husband to my mother, and I think he realised that for he fired himself when I was seven years old. I always assumed he got himself a new job as husband and father somewhere else, but I never bothered to find out.
I paid the fate-scribe at the Monastery of Saint Anlas-who-remembers-the-world a good deal of money to write this, though I will never see it myself. How they can transcribe the events of a man’s life from afar, I do not know. Some say they read the threads of fate, or they bond with a man’s mind and capture his thoughts to put down on paper. Others say they just make this shit up, since by the time anyone gets to read it the person it’s about is almost certainly dead. Whichever it is, I hope they at least get this next part right because there are two stories separated by twenty-five years and I think they’re both important, so try to pay attention.
The first is this: I was eight years old and living with my mother on the outskirts of a town that bordered the outskirts of the next town. My mother often sent me on errands that, in retrospect, now seem a bit suspicious. ‘Falcio, run into town and fetch me a single carrot. Make it a good one, mind you.’ Or, ‘Falcio, run into town and ask the messenger to confirm how much it will cost us to send a letter to your grandfather in Fraletta.’
Now, I don’t know how it is where you live, but the cost of sending a letter along the main roads hasn’t changed in Pertine for fifty years, and I’m still not sure what one can make with a single carrot. But me being away pleased my mother well enough, and it gave me time to go to the tavern and listen to Bal Armidor. Bal was a young travelling storyteller who spent a great deal of time in our town. He brought middle-aged men of means news of what was happening outside of Pertine and regaled old men with crooked backs with righteous stories of the Saints. He sang young girls sweet songs of romance that made them blush and their admirers boil … and he told me stories of the Greatcoats.
‘I’ll tell you a secret, Falcio,’ he said to me one afternoon. The tavern was almost empty and he was tuning his guitar and preparing for the evening’s entertainment. The bartender, washing last night’s mugs, rolled his eyes at us.
‘I promise not to tell anyone, Bal, ever,’ I said, as if taking a solemn vow. My voice was kind of creaky, so it didn’t actually sound much like a real vow to me.
Bal chuckled. ‘No need for that, my trusty friend.’
Good thing too, I suppose, since I’m about to break the oath.
‘What’s the secret, Bal?’
He glanced up from his guitar and looked around the room before motioning for me to come closer. He spoke in that whisper of his that sounded like it could travel on the wind and reach you from a hundred miles away.
‘You know how I told you about King Ugrid?’
‘The evil King who disbanded the Greatcoats and swore they would never again use cloak and sword to help the people of the land?’
‘Now, remember, Falcio,’ Bal said, ‘the Greatcoats weren’t just a bunch of swordsmen running around fighting monsters and evildoers, were they? They were the travelling Magisters. They heard the complaints of the people who lived outside the reach of the King’s Constabulary, and they meted out justice in his name.’
‘But Ugrid hated them,’ I said, hating the embarrassing whine in my voice.
‘King Ugrid was very close to the Dukes,’ Bal said evenly, ‘and they believed it was their right to administer and set the laws on their own lands. Not all Kings agreed with that idea, but Ugrid believed that as long as the Dukes paid their taxes and levies, then what they did on their own lands was their business.’
‘But everyone knows the Dukes are tyrants,’ I started.
Bal’s hand came out of nowhere and slapped me hard across the face. When he spoke, his voice was deadly cold. ‘Don’t you ever say such a thing again, Falcio. Do you understand me?’
I tried to speak, but couldn’t. Bal had never taken a hand to me before and the shock of his betrayal stayed my tongue. After a moment, he set his guitar down and put his hands on my shoulders. I flinched.
‘Falcio,’ he sighed, ‘do you know what would happen to you if one of the Duke’s men heard you use the word tyrant when speaking of their Lord? Do you know what would happen to me? There are two words you must be very careful about ever saying aloud: tyrant, and traitor – because they often go together, and usually with terrible results.’
I tried to ignore him, but when he removed his hands, I couldn’t help myself. ‘So what is it?’
‘What is what?’
‘The secret. You promised to tell me a secret, but then you hit me instead.’
Bal ignored the jibe. Resuming his whisper and conspiratorial manner, he leaned closer, as if nothing had happened. ‘Well, when King Ugrid decreed that the Greatcoats would never ride again, he said it would be for all time, right?’
I nodded.
‘King Ugrid had a councillor named Caeolo – Caeolo the Mystery, they called him – and some people believed he was a wizard of great skill and wisdom.’
‘I’ve never heard of Caeolo,’ I said, excitement overwhelming sore cheek and wounded pride.
‘Very few have,’ Bal said. ‘Caeolo vanished mysteriously before Ugrid died, and he never appeared again.’
‘Maybe he killed Ugrid … Maybe he—’
Bal interrupted me. ‘Now don’t start that mind of yours tumbling all over itself, Falcio. Once it starts, it won’t stop until you pass out from exhaustion.’ The storyteller looked around the room again, though there was no one else there except for the tavern master cleaning cups at the other end of the room. I don’t know if he could hear us, but he had good ears on him.
‘Well, as the story goes, after the decree was read aloud in the court, Caeolo took his King aside and said, “My King, though you are Lord of all things and I but your humble councillor, know that the words of a King, no matter how powerful, outlive him by no more than a hundred years.” Ugrid looked at him, shocked at the impertinence, and cried, “What do you think you’re saying to me, Caeolo?” Unperturbed, Caeolo answered, “Only this, my King, that in a hundred years the Greatcoats will ride again, and your mighty words will fade from memory.”’
Bal looked down at me with what, at the time, I thought was a sparkle in his eyes, although now, looking back, I think it might well have been a tear.
‘And do you know how long ago King Ugrid died?’ Bal asked me. When I shook my head, he leaned in close and spoke directly into my ear. ‘Almost a hundred years.’
My heart leapt straight up out of my chest. It was like my blood had been replaced with lightning. I could—
‘Damn you, Bal,’ the tavern master shouted from across the room. ‘Don’t you go filling that boy’s head with your horseshit.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. My voice sounded strange to me for a moment.
The tavern master stepped out from behind the bar. ‘There never were no damned Greatcoats. It’s just a story people tell when they ain’t happy with the way things are. Travelling Magisters going about armoured in leather cloaks and fighting with swords and hearing complaints from bloody peasants and servants? It’s shit folk-tales, boy. It never happened.’
Something about the way he dismissed the Greatcoats so easily – so completely – made the world feel small and empty to me – as small and empty as a house filled with nothing but the idle fancies of a small boy and the sad longings of a lonely woman who still stared outside on cold winter evenings, waiting for her long-gone husband to return.
Bal started to protest the tavern master’s comments, but I interrupted, ‘You’re wrong – you’re wrong! There were too Greatcoats, and they did do all those things. Stupid rotten King Ugrid banned them, but Caeolo knew! He said they’re going to come back one day and they are too going to come back!’
I ran for the door before someone else could hit me – but then I stopped and turned around and I put my fist up on my heart. ‘And I’m going to be one of them,’ I swore. And this time it really did sound like a vow.