|
Saga
He was torn.
Not literally, of course, though that did tend to be a hazard of his chosen profession.
He hated when people made that joke, and often made it himself, whether aloud or to himself, before anyone else could get to it. This usually didn't do anything to help his mood. In fact, this usually put him in a more sour mood than he had been in previously.
And himself being fourteen years old, he was rather prone to sour moods, as was often pointed out to himself, which plunged him deeper and deeper into the sort of sour mood in which no one really ever wanted to experience a fourteen year old boy.
Especially when the fourteen year old boy was king, at least nominally, of some sort of province or something somewhere in, like, damn, like France or somewhere...Lorraine, or maybe Austria, whatever the hell it was, he had to skip geography and history just about the time when the teacher got around to instilling in his pupils that it actually was worthwhile knowing the difference between a Visigoth and a Teutonic Knight and the twelfth and eleventh centuries (and the jokes about 100 years, chuckle chuckle died down from the back of the room) and divine right of kings and all that sort of craic.
Well, he had gotten the divine right of kings bit, of course he had, but he figured that if it was a divine right he shouldn't have to make such stupid decisions and the instances in which he had to make stupid decisions were sort of overshadowed by maybe brimstone and fire shooting out of great big cracks in the Earth accompanied by all the denizens of Hell and that lot so that maybe then not everyone in the whole damn province or country or whatever it was he ruled watching his every move, awaiting his decision. Still, as it was, he was standing there, tunic-clad, his maroon one, a particular favourite, if a bit worse the wear for it and the thing barely stayed on for the number of frayed threads in it, in front of a mirror, which allowed him to see the frayed threads quite clearly, sort of, in a way, in the bumpy primitive sort of mirror that wasn't much more than a pile of sand, actually, as his tribesmen hadn't gotten around to figuring out how to make the sand into reflective thin sort of flat surfaces the way some of the other tribes had done, and he was trying to decide. His hair was just that sort of stage where he either needed to cut it short again, perhaps shaving it as short as he could manage, or maybe he should let it grow...
"It's been tradition as long as anyone can remember that the sovereign grows his, erm, your hair as long as possible. And, to, ehm, grow a beard."
This last remark didn't go down terribly well. It almost called for a big sulk, if that wasn't what he could see on the face of the person who said it, which, yes, was his long-suffering mum, who made always seemed to have this thing about pointing out his rather infuriating (well, to himself, anyway) inability to grow hair on his face, like it was his choice or some sort of failing on his part that whatever hormones or whatever caused hair to grow were a bit slow in his case. And he knew that a sulk was just going to set his cause back for getting to rush about with his father's sword and shield-like thingy with the big metally bits that stuck out rather menacingly and he was going to have to spend another year not, well, not rushing about with his da's sword and the shield thing.
He had a feeling he was just going to have to let his damn hair grow, and get around to calling upon that cute princess in the next province or something over, the one with the hair and the father that had the dogs.
disclaimer:
Yes, you guessed it, back with more stuff we do these days, or so it seems.
Don't leave your seats, for fear of missing a second of it!
|
Yer Weekly Horoscopes.