Stewardship

His first memory:

He can't be more than four; maybe three and a half – his mother is well, then, her stomach flat under the graceful fall of her shift. Sometimes he wishes he could better remember her face, more than the curve of her mouth smiling, the sharp bracket of its frown. She smelled of juniper and roses, he remembers. His father always brought her roses. And his grandfather can still pick him up, swooping him off his sturdy little feet to spin him round and round strong bony shoulders.

In the memory, his father is very tall. As childhood memories go, it presents itself in a blur of smell (polished wood, all orange and beeswax; the damp wool of his father's cloak – it must have been winter; the stony scent of ink) and sleepy golden light, which now he knows for candles, with sharp pinpricks of lucidity.

He hovers in the doorway, uncharacteristically shy, for even then his father was stern. Stern, and tall. At least sixteen feet, he thinks. Funny, how time has shrunk the man.

He is chilly, though not cold, and when his father beckons him over, gladly he comes, perching on a lean thigh and burrowing into the aromatic warmth of the scratchy cloak, his father's voice a pleasing rumble, as much sensation as sound. A protective earthquake, his father, before he lost his mind. He remembers the hard hand stroking his hair, and the candlelight dimming as he leans into it, loath to move despite the great horn his father wears at his hip, digging into the tender flesh behind his knee, a minor pain in the rare bliss of affection from his father.

God, he must have been young. Any older than four, and there would have been no lap – only a stern “Go away, child. Not now.” Even for him, the golden boy. Hah!

Four, and tired, lulled by the warmth, by the comforting, paternal scents of wool and beeswax, he begins to drift off. It is the last words that prick him, before sleep wraps him up:

“And that is what stewardship means: not to be given to rule, but to be given in trust.” Like stones his father's voice falls into the dark warmth of sleep. He is too young to know what the dictionary has to say on stewards and their job. After this, he does not care. “Some there were who ruled like kings, and they were wrong. A steward does not rule at all. A steward guards, child. He keeps the realm safe, and that is all.”

He has come to realise since, that his father was worrying for that realm, knowing his own father to be dying, slowly. The memory makes the wind sting his eyes, and he shakes his head sharply.

Now, a man grown, he touches the great horn at his hip, reflexively, the habit born of years, assuring himself that it's still there, the curving symbol, more powerful than stabbing sword or heavy crown – the symbol of guardianship, the clarion call to those he guards and who guard him in turn. Given in trust, his father said: and what trust can be, that does not extend both ways?

He can never know if his father, saying “realm,” meant “kingdom.” He knows the father he has now most certainly would; would he have done so, then? Either way it does not matter. To him, it meant the people of the realm, their dreams and businesses, their hopes and petty quarrels, their crops and crafts and baubles. Let his father have his kings.

Under his hand, the horn is cold. The night smells of chilled stone, freezing water, winter trees. A sword would channel the heat of his body; a crown would hold it. He much prefers the horn.