-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ____________________________ \___________\_________\_____\ \__ __ / ____/ \ / / _/ ___/__ _/ \ / / / \ / / \/____/_____\________/________/ "/ i />/>z" pz: RED-005.TXT aka "Bastard" by: Archangel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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