Tales of the Zodiac - The Goat's Tale (5 page)

I cast one last unrequited glance to the headmaster as he scurries out of the door. Vesta rises from her seat like a puff of steam.

“Your Majesty.” She bows her acquiescence as she speaks but the gesture is so perfunctory as to be almost damning. She beckons me to a large door across the room to my right, opposite the smaller door through which the headmaster has left. I reach it first but step aside in order to allow her to open it. She returns the favour by allowing me to walk through before her.

My mind immediately moves to Vesta and her intent. She could have been tasked to kill me. She certainly has the cold eyes for it. And the distant manner. If that were the case, I imagine I’d have little chance to escape.

But there is more to Vesta than the simple scent of a killer. Something that I cannot put my finger on. It is a certain arrogance, almost bordering on contempt. Even in that large room, with the weight of royal favour upon her, sitting alongside the king, I did not sense that she was
with
him. She was almost indifferent to him.

I follow Vesta through the white stone labyrinth. The corridors are so bare and minimal that they are disorientating and it is not difficult to imagine becoming completely lost. The lack of decadence and ornament helps me to deduce that we must be in the servant’s quarters.

The walk, meanwhile, is accompanied by a strangely comfortable silence. I sense that neither of us places too much value upon conversation. This, in addition to the repetitiveness of the scenery, seems to only add to the distance we cover.

Indeed, I feel as though we have walked twice the circumference of the palace before we arrive at her chambers. She steps inside and opens the door, holding it so that I can follow through. The austere whiteness is the first thing to strike me, and instinct temporarily stops me from going further. I sense some sort of trap. It could be a gaol cell, albeit without a bed, hidden away in the belly of the palace.

It is at once immaculate and severe. The white walls, made of the same Tallakarn stone, seem cleaner here than anywhere else in the palace. Meanwhile, there is not an awful lot else to take in. There is a dark oak desk in the middle of the floor with two very basic matching chairs on either side. That is all. I doubt that there is even a speck of dust. The only man in the kingdom that would consider this room to be decadent would be my father. “Four walls? Only a sheep needs a pen.”

“Take a seat,” she commands. Vesta’s tone is no friendlier outside of the king’s presence. As is custom, I select the chair facing away from the door. It screeches over the white stone as I pull it away from the table. It is desperately uncomfortable; a chair designed to look like a chair rather than to serve as one. Vesta glides past and into her own seat. There is an efficient grace to her movement. Her eyes meet mine, possibly for the first time since our introduction. It is only now that I notice an almost androgynous quality to her face.

“Welcome to my chambers. This is my reception room. I have been told it is somewhat barren, but for this I do not apologise.” The tone of her voice, flat and emotionless, makes this lack of apology quite clear.

I shrug. I cannot say that my or my father’s room would be much different were we to inhabit a palace and, even if it would, it is not my place to judge. I am simply relieved that it is not a gaol cell. To my further relief, she skips any further conversational courtesies.

“Have you ever heard of Brightstone?” she asks. Her voice is unusually precise, possessing no trace of any local accent. Meanwhile, the question itself concerns me deeply.

“Yes,” I reply.

“What do you know of it?” she asks. There is not a hint of curiosity in her voice.

If a person is going to be sent to a place, the bare minimum that they might hope for is that it actually exists. Unfortunately, this is not the case for Brightstone. It is somewhere beyond the snow, the stuff of folklore, the kind of place that one might hear about from the friend of an uncle whose wife’s grandfather’s cousin had been there and survived. It is somewhere that people merely
hope
might exist, some other vestige of humanity clinging on to this otherwise dead, frozen mass.

“I know nothing of it. Only what I have heard.”

“And what have you heard?”

“Well… To begin with, most people say that it doesn’t exist.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think that you probably know one way or another.”

“Very good. What if I were to tell you that it does exist?”

“I’d probably be more likely to believe you than anyone else I know.” It is only as I say these words that I realise they are true. Even though I have only just met her, I realise that this grey, slender woman with all the charisma of cold stone has made quite an impression on me. She is clearly a superior being.

“Then you are a good judge of character. It does indeed exist.”

“How do you know?”

“I have been there. Some time ago.”

“I see.” A boy given to enthusiasm would have perhaps reacted differently.

“It is the only other civilisation on The Mother Island. That is not to say we share much in common. Brightstone is more advanced; they have technologies and wealth beyond what people here can imagine. It is also much older – perhaps a thousand years old. As it is more northerly and less exposed to the Eastern Sea, it is also possesses a more pleasant climate.”

“It sounds like you should have stayed there,” I reply.

“Things are not always so simple, Gruffydd.” She takes a map from a drawer in the table and lays it out before me.

Although I have seen maps less brown and faded, I have never seen one so accurate before. The only accurate maps that I have ever seen depict the known world. This map, meanwhile, makes the world appear much bigger than I had previously understood. Maps of the Mother Island simply don’t exist any more and, although I was aware of its existence, I had never had an inkling of its shape, size or extent. There was probably one time when a drawing of an old man’s faint memory of how the Mother Island used to look would not have been too far from reality. But when the drawing of that faint memory has been copied and copied for hundreds of years without verification, it becomes useless. So useless in fact that the practice of copying them has long since ceased.

She points to me our position in relation to Brightstone. For a brief moment, I feel that rarest of emotions: excitement. For an even briefer moment, this excitement even surpasses that nagging doubt that I am only being provided with this knowledge for one terrible reason.

“As the crow flies, it is four hundred and thirty seven kilometres away from here on a north-westerly bearing. You should also note that it is not provided with the same natural barriers as our royal kingdom of Tallakarn. This makes it exposed to the snow savages in a way that we are not. The consequences of this are that the people of Brightstone have not been able to colonise
any
of the mainland in the way that we have and that, out of necessity, they are much, much greater fighters,” she says. She talks with such focus and precision that I cannot help but be impressed.

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.

“You’re a sharp boy. Why don’t you tell me?” Vesta smiles the first smile that I have seen from her. It is a thin one, not altogether friendly.

“You want me to go there.”

“Prince Libran told us that you were sharp. Sharp and prickly, he said. Like a gorse bush.” Her eye contact, beginning from nothing, has become disconcertingly constant.

“People may think of me as they like. Why do you want me to go there? Is there not a less imaginative way that you could have me killed?”

“Why would we want to have you killed?” she questions flatly. Even this emotive comment doesn’t bring so much as a flush of blood to her pale face.

“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.”