Chillbirtoos, I thought, repeating the name in my mind as he had pronounced it. My father was Chillbirtoos, a brilliant soldier. The skin on my arms rose up in gooseflesh, but the King was still talking.
“We became close, he and I, over the ten years that followed, brothers in arms, closer than blood brothers—him and me and one other friend who outranked both of us and commanded an entire army group. And then, one day about twelve years ago, your father and I met and married twin sisters—the Lady Vivienne, here, and your own mother, the Lady Elaine, both daughters of King Garth of Ganis.” He stopped suddenly, then waved his hand toward his wife in an unmistakable order for her to hold her peace. He kept his eyes fixed on mine. “Stand up.”
I rose to my feet obediently.
“Would you ever call my wife a whore?”
The question stunned me, and I felt my face blaze with a sudden rush of blood and shame at the awfulness of what he had asked me. I did not dare to look at the Lady Vivienne, nor had I words to answer him, so I merely shook my head, blushing harder than ever.
“What does that mean, that mum show? Answer my question.”
“No! I never would. Never.”
“I thought not. But yet you called her sister one—your own dead mother whom you never knew.”
My humiliation was complete. I lowered my head in an attempt to hide the hot tears that blurred my sight.
I heard him moving, rising from his perch and coming toward me, and then I felt his rough hand grasp my chin, not ungently, and lift my head to where I could see him peering into my watery eyes. I blinked hard, trying to clear my vision and look back at him defiantly, but I knew nothing of defiance then, and he had no thought of seeing any.
“Frotto lied, boy, because he is a fool and knows no better. You are more man, at ten years old, than he will ever be. But a man must quickly learn to recognize the truth when he hears it, and to know the difference between truth and lies. Hear the truth now, from me, witnessed by my wife who is your mother’s sister. What you have heard about your mother is a malicious lie, spread by this Frotto’s mother, who is even more stupid than her witless son. She worked here once, when you were newly arrived, and we cast her out for lying and for clumsy thievery. Her tattling afterward was the result of that—malicious gossip bred of sullen resentment, nothing more.
“Your mother was Elaine of Ganis and she loved you. She loved your father, Childebertus, who was my friend, even more. She and your father both died because of an evil man—she by her own hand—and you yourself survived only by good fortune and the bravery of the same man who set you to work on the stones today, Chulderic of Ganis. He brought you here to us, and here you have remained. Apart from Chulderic and ourselves, and Clodio, who led Chulderic to us when he first arrived, no one here knows who you really are, including Frotto’s vindictive mother. You became our son because you were already dear to us as the child of those we had loved and lost. And you will remain our son for as long as you wish to do so. Do you understand what I have told you?”
I nodded, half blinded by, but now uncaring of, the tears that streamed down my face. He nodded back at me and sucked in a great, deep breath through his nostrils. “Aye, well, that’s good. So be it. And so be it that you never think another thought of your mother having abandoned you. She bought your life with her own and died in your defense. Don’t ever forget that.”
“I won’t.” I looked again to where the Lady Vivienne sat watching me. “But what will I call you now?”
“Hmm?” The King’s deep-chested grunt betrayed his surprise, but he answered me immediately. “You’ll call us what you always have—Father and Mother. Why should you not? Nothing has changed. We will still call you Clothar and you will continue to be as much a son to us as you have always been. We will continue to be your parents, in the eyes of everyone who knows no better. It’s safer to keep it that way.”
“But why, Father? Why is it safer, I mean?”
His swift frown of impatience with my slowness died as quickly as it had sprung into being. “Because you are yet at risk. Your father’s murderer is still alive and well, and he is powerful, damnation to his black, worthless soul. Better that we do nothing that could betray you to him, for if he even suspected that you live he would send men to kill you, and he would not stop until you were dead, because fatherless boys grow up to be men capable of seeking vengeance for their fathers’ murders.”
I thought for a moment, then asked, “Who is this man, Father?”
“His name is Clodas. Clodas of Ganis. At least, that’s what he calls himself now and will for a few more years, unless God smites him dead in the meantime. But he was no more than plain Clodas, a minor chief among your father’s clans, before he set eyes upon your mother and began his scheming. In the end, he slew both your parents and your grandfather and usurped your grandfather’s holdings, stealing his very name.”
“But why didn’t you fight him, kill him, take revenge on him?” In my ten-year-old eyes, Ban of Benwick was omnipotent and invincible in war. I found it incredible that he should not have exacted vengeance long ago on the slayer of his friends and family.
His mouth twisted wryly before he glanced from me to his wife and back. “A fair question, I suppose. And one that I have often asked myself, even knowing all the answers. I couldn’t, Clothar. That’s the only answer I can give you. I could not, for many reasons, none of which might make any sense to you today.”
“Why not? Because I’m just a boy?”
He shrugged and almost smiled, but then he sobered. “Aye. That’s right.”
“But you’ve just told me I’m to be a man, from this day on. It’s time to grow up, you said, and face the truth … to leave childhood behind and face the world of men. Isn’t that what you said? Tell me, then, as a man.”
He inhaled deeply, straightening his back, then blew the air from between pursed lips. “Very well, as a man, then. I had my hands full here when all this happened, and the news came but slowly to us. We heard nothing about it for months—more than half a year. It was only when Chulderic arrived the following summer, bringing you and your nurse, that we found out what had occurred.”
“Ludda came with me? She is from Ganis, too?”
“No, not Ludda. Your first nurse died. She was sick with a fever from the journey when she arrived and she died within a few days. Ludda came to us after that, because she had lost her own child at birth and had milk, so she could feed you.”
“How old was I?”
“Young—not yet a year.”
I thought about that, then dismissed it. “You said you couldn’t fight this man Clodas because your hands were full. Full of what?”
He half grinned at my unconscious humor. “Many things,” he said with a shrug, “and most of them like sand, threatening to run through my fingers and be scattered on the winds no matter what I did. I had a war to fight, first and foremost. The Alamanni were threatening to wipe us out, and my father was newly dead, killed fighting them. I had to take his place or see our home and our people go down into ruin and destruction.”
I nodded gravely, trying to impress him with my understanding, for I knew the truth of what he said from my own lessons. The man whom I had always thought of as my grandfather until that day, King Ban the Bald, had been the first true king of Benwick, awarded the title by the Emperor Theodosius in recognition of thirty years of loyal service to the Empire. He had ruled Benwick well for twenty-five years after that and had fallen in battle against the Alamanni, at seventy years of age, the year before I was born.