"After you and he had fought ... "
"Yes."
"And why did you decide to fight him?"
"I didn't decide. I was fighting him before I knew what I was doing. He bent Ghilly over and beat him with the flat of the old sword. Ghilly was crying, and the next thing I knew, I was on the ground and Droc was kicking me."
"I see. Did you blood him?"
A tiny smile flickered on the boy's lips. "I must have, his nose was bleeding."
"What about the others, Bedwyr and Gwin? Didn't they help you?"
"They couldn't. Landroc kept them out of it. So Droc thrashed me and then the two of them walked away, laughing. He did it because he could, and that is all there is to understand, I suppose."
"What, that he's a bully?"
The look he threw me was one of pure pity. "No, that he is the king's son."
I was astounded, unwilling to believe what I had heard.
"What does that have to do with anything? Do you believe King Derek would condone his son's behaviour in this?"
"It has to do with everything, Merlyn, and it began last week." Ignoring the expression on my face, he spoke to me as if I were the boy and he the teacher, and I sat, fascinated by his words and his passion. "Last week, the day after Uncle Ambrose came, I found something, too—something much more valuable than Ghilly's old sword. I found a brooch, in the deep woods outside the town walls, a big, old brooch with a jewelled stone in it like a large piece of yellow glass. It was of silver, I think, but all tarnished green and black with age. Foolishly, I showed it to Kesler when I returned to Ravenglass that day, and he tried to snatch it from me. We fought over it."
Kesler was yet another of Derek's many sons, but he was of an age with Arthur, and smaller in stature.
"Well? You fought, and then what?"
"One of King Derek's captains stopped us and wanted to know what we were fighting about."
"Who was it, do you know? And what did you tell him?"
"It was Longinus, the catapult engineer, and we told him the truth."
"And what happened then ?"
"He made me give the brooch to Kesler, because Kesler was the king's son and the brooch was therefore his, found on the king's land."
"I see. And how did you feel about that?"
The boy gnawed on the inside of his cheek, considering his answer.
"I was angry at first, and then I was not ... or not as much."
"How so?"
"Because I did not really believe the brooch was mine. It never had been mine and had belonged to someone else. Someone had lost it, sometime in the past. And it had value—even beneath all the dirt you could see that. The size and colour of the stone, and the scribing on the metal ... it was the kind of thing not worn by ordinary folk, so it must have belonged to someone of rank, someone from Ravenglass, perhaps the king himself or one of his family ... "
"But?"
He grimaced. "But if that were so, I think Longinus should have taken it to give to the king himself, he should not merely have permitted one of the king's sons to take it. That did not become clear to me at the time. I only thought about it afterwards. Was I right to think so?"
I let that one pass, for the moment. "Hmm. And then Droc took the sword today. I see now what concerns you."
"Do you?" The lad's face brightened.
"Of course I do. The injustice of what you witnessed today brought out the anger you've been feeling since the first occasion."
"No!" His voice was suddenly loud again, echoing the lightning change that had swept over his face as I spoke. He caught himself, moderating his tone. "No, it's much more than that, Merlyn. Can't you see what happened? Droc had plainly heard about my finding the brooch and what had happened over that, and when he saw the sword that Ghilly had found, he simply decided it was his, by right, since it had been found in his father's territories. So he puffed up his chest, displayed his muscles and took it, despite the fact that it was worthless to him. That is the injustice."
Abruptly, we had come to the nub of the matter. Now it was clearly evident. This nine-year-old boy had come up against an injustice, clearly delineated in his uncorrupted view, and now he was wrestling with the abstractions of justice and its uneasy relationship to physical power; with the philosophical intangibles of force and power and their influence on morality! I drew a long, deep breath, holding up my hand to give him pause, and tried to marshal my chaotic thoughts. Here, I knew, was a seminal moment in the relationship between my ward and me, a moment I could neither ignore nor defer to another time. But how was I to respond? Watching me closely, waiting for me to speak, he leaned backward in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.
"Look you," I began, then subsided again, rubbing the side of one finger against the stubble on my chin. The boy made no attempt to hurry me but sat watching me, unblinking. I dropped my hand from my face and sat straighter in my chair.
"Arthur, there are some things ... some aspects of life ... that appear to change as boys grow into men. They did for me, and they do for all boys. I think you have just come face to face with one of them. In a boy's world, I think, colours are easy to identify—black is black and white is white." I saw his eyes cloud with incomprehension and hurried on to explain myself. "All that means is that, when you're a boy, good is good and bad is bad and there's no difficulty in telling the two apart and then behaving in accordance with your findings. For instance, I believe most boys see men in one of three ways. There are men they like and admire, and they try to stay close to such men, emulating them. Then there are the ruck—the unknown strangers, the common mass of men—to whom they are indifferent, and they go on about their lives as boys always have, ignoring them as insignificant. The third kind of men are those they dislike—the bullies, the misanthropes— unpleasant men. These men wise boys avoid and take great pains to stay away from them. Would you agree?"
Arthur nodded, slowly and deliberately, and I found myself speaking with much solemnity as I continued.
"Good. Well, that ability to avoid such men is one of the things that changes as a boy grows older. While he is still a boy, his avoidance of them is unimportant and unnoticed. He may run and hide from them and spend his days avoiding them and suffer nothing by his flight, because he is a mere boy and hence beneath the notice of grown men. That is his great good fortune, though he is ignorant of all of it.
"When he grows up to man's estate, however, all of that changes. He is still the same boy in his heart, but his body has become a man's body, and his cares a man's concerns. He may no longer run and hide when his old enemies and their kind approach. Flight without dishonour has become impossible with the arrival of manhood. Do you understand what I am saying?"
"I think so. You are saying a man must stand and fight such men, or forfeit his honour."
"No, Arthur, I am not saying that, not exactly. What I am saying is that a man must learn to live among such men, to make allowance for their imperfections, and to strive to live a decent, honourable life in spite of them. He need not—indeed he cannot—-always fight them."
"Why not?"
"Because ... because there are so many of them, if the truth be told."
"So many? D'you mean there are more of them than there are honourable men?"
Did I mean that? I had to think carefully before responding.
"No, Arthur, I did not mean to suggest that at all, but you are forcing me here to think carefully about what I do mean, and I find it difficult to be exact. Let me think about it for a little." He sat gazing at me until I was ready to speak again, and I resumed slowly.
"I suppose the reality is that men—the ruck, that common mass of men I spoke of earlier—are indolent when all ] boils down to honour and dishonour. They would prefer an easy life, free of complication and the need to think about things whose meaning will elude them. That is not to say they lack honour, you understand? It merely means they are ... "