Dangerous Ideas from the Wood: The Pretender

The old captain had always been very kind to the boy prince. He was a canny man, the captain, with something deeper in his eye than most and scars on his body from combat. He was bald at this stage in life and as often as not wore his mail shirt, though he reserved his greaves and spalders for special occasions.

“Now, young prince,” the captain would say, “this stuffed shirt is your uncle. I want you to prove your accuracy. Let's go! Now!”

The captain hated the prince's uncle. The prince's father should have been the legitimate king; his uncle had only won the throne by fratricide. They had fought, the two brothers, and torn the country apart with war. For five years every villager hid his crops away and buried his coin-hoard on his land. For five years every wife had slept uneasily in her bed, her mind running round and round with the idea of her sons and her husband and daughters and the memory of burning torches and a horse burnt alive in the stables the last time the war had reached their village.

The old captain knew whose fault it was: the captain knew a thing or two about history and the story of their people. It was the King's fault, that vile evil man: he was one who had started this war. The very man that now sat on the throne of the kingdom and claimed to protect it was the man that had wrecked it.

The captain had fought in the civil war. He had opposed the evil king. They had struggled, his comrades and he, struggled against hunger and cold and mud and blades tearing roughly through meat and skulls crushed by the reverse point of a axe or a hammer. He'd seen a thing or two, and he'd been one of the few that had seen it clearly. It's one thing having your opinions and ideas sat back at your hearth, sleeping in a bed with your woman and living off the fat of the land: that was all well and good, but if you've not been to war how can you begin to understand it? He hated war, the old captain, in that pure true way that only someone who has murdered for the king can understand.

“It's a vile business,” he said on one of the days he wore all the armour he owned. He was kneeling in front of a soldier's grave, medals dripping from his chest and tears of pride weeping from his eyes. “Vile. Best pay tribute, young prince, in remembrance of all those brave servants of the cause who struggled to maintain civilisation when all around them fell into barbarism.”

“Never forget, lad, the things those bastards did. They'd come early in the morning and take whole families away. They'd line them up in front of a pit and” - the captain slapped his palms together - “that was it. They took the foreigners. And their political opponents, and anyone who said anything against their false church. I myself had a Jewish grandmother; perhaps they would have tried to take me? See, they'd take anyone, didn't matter what sort of person you were if you fell into a category they didn't like. Those murderers. I tell you what I'd do if one of them walked in here now. He wouldn't walk out again, I tell you.”

At the start, the civil war had seemed to be simple. The old king, the prince's grandfather, had been murdered. A man was hanged for the murder, but that is about all we may say with any certainty on the matter. Soon, the old queen, the wife of the murdered king, was firmly in control. Her son, our prince's father, was the heir, but he was not yet of age and she and her loyal courtiers had been elected to the regency council.

Then people began to talk. They said that the old queen had arranged her husband's demise. She was certainly more powerful than she had been, and the king had had a number of mistresses. It was not thought that his infidelities were motive enough to provoke regicide - after all, what is a king without a number of women to lord over? - but it would certainly have made things easier in the mind of a woman drunk on the acquisition and enjoyment of power. That she was a royal consort was proof enough that she was a grasping climber.

Soon the younger son, the current king, found himself surrounded with men eager to wrestle control from the regency council. They soon found that there were just as many titles and estates to go round as their were eager politicising men. It is true that men like that like to appear to be self-satisfied and important, but no matter how far they climb or how much importance they believe they have attained, they are never satisfied and always demand more. Occasionally these men see the errors of the ways, but usually the only balance on this runaway system is death, either natural or unnatural.

The pot boiled for fourteen years, and the man who had been a boy king found himself with a young son of his own. But then the greed of men exceeded the elasticity in the system and the suffering spilt over from those whom it belonged to into the lives of all those they touched.

Today, twelve years hence and seven years since the end of the first civil war, the old captain and the prince found themselves together on the evening after a battle which had been neither decisive nor short. Now the men on both sides had returned to their lines, sentries were posted and they tried to sleep.

“You know,” said the prince, who suddenly found himself on the cusp of becoming a man, “you know... it seems to me... it's one of those things...”

The proud captain had one hand on the shoulder of his protege. He felt sure the prince was about to say something that military historians would proudly quote for centuries.
The prince stammered, and then began to spit it out. “Since my father died,” he said, “I have been so alone.”

The boy looked up at the man who had taken his father's place. He saw the pores on the powerful man's face, and the quality of the shave the captain had had perhaps an hour before. The prince saw a thousand meals of rich meat and the thoroughness of the nutrition that had built the captain's features.

“Please, sir,” said the prince, “there are men laid dying as we speak. There are harvests uncut in the fields and old women who will find, come February, that there is no more flour in the sack.

“There are men who otherwise would be poets and scientists and doctors all bleeding to death. I met a man once, I only spoke to him for a few minutes, but do you know he felt such an affinity with water? When he dreamed he felt himself draining through the moss into rivers and flowing down and out to the sea. He said he'd spent a month in the blood vessels of an otter. Can you imagine? Sir?”

The captain shook his head. “I always knew you were simple,” he said, “but I had to try. Soft, that's what you are. You don't know what's good for you. Bleeding heart. What would you do if they were here now? What would you do if your father was still alive and you were there as they were torturing him?”

“Please.”

“Would you stand by? No, you'd fight like anyone else.”

“Of course I'd fight, just like you did. And then I'd be as bad as you.”

In the morning, the prince rode out alone across the lines. He had tied a token of parlay to his personal standard and was quickly picked up by the enemy knights and taken to the King's tent.

The young prince was almost thrown into his Uncle's presence. The King turned and faced the boy, taking his crown from his head and wiping the sweat of concentration from his brow. But there was such a look upon the young man's face. It made everyone in the area stop. No one spoke. The boy did not hate his Uncle. The boy did not forgive his Uncle; they were beyond forgiveness.

A tear formed on the King's cheek. The warlord offered his hand, and they shook, and they embraced, and the King fell to his knee and cradled the boy in his arms.