The Goatherd and the King by Julie Steimle (read an ebook week .txt) 📖

Part One: The Aristocrat

Chapter One:
Family Relations

“I’ll be going to school at the end of this month,” the young and strapping Zeldar said with a sigh, plucking off the petals to the hill flower he was holding in his hands. “I really hate going away, but Father says I will eventually take up the business and I need to learn how to manage it. But I say, if you know how to manage goats, you can learn to handle any man.”
The goat herders laughed to themselves. That was the saying, passed on for generations, but it had yet to be proven true. If it had been, the goat herders themselves could have been diplomats.
“The thing is,” Zeldar said with a tired huff and falling to the grass where he had been having lunch, “I have been signed up to go to the Red Hall Academy for some time. I just haven’t told my father yet because, you know my stepmother…it is not prestigious enough for a nobleman’s son and Father has been taking her advice lately.
“He wants me to go to Ferr’durnak University with all my old classmates,” the young man continued with a groan. “Old boring Ferr’durnak where the professors tell us we’re the leaders of the world, gods compared to the other classes and heathen nations. I had enough of that at my old school, thank you, to hear that rubbish again.”
“And you don’t believe it none, I gather?” one of the herdsmen said with a wry smile.
Sitting up, Zeldar made a face. “What? And be reminded that I’m nothing more than the half-blood son of an Orr’ras. Really…I find the vanity of our people shocking. We place too much emphasis on purity of race and not enough emphasis on treating other people kindly.”
The men grinned at him, sucking on stems of dill weed that grew between the cracks of the rocks on the Tur skirts. None of them bothered to voice their opinions at all, knowing this nobleman’s son sometimes had loose lips and repeated their words in fits of anger at his stepmother. She did not take too well to goatherd philosophy, even if Jarr the Great was once a goat herder himself. She didn’t approve of the legends of Jarr either. The mythic hero had married an Orr’ras like Zeldar’s father; and the reminder of it, even in legend, was like an insult.
Of course Zeldar worshipped the tales of Jarr the Great since he was a child. He was his favorite hero. Forget the adventures of Torr the Sailor or the amazing Kanzar that tamed an army of demons in the Orr; they were frauds in Zeldar’s mind anyway—later copies of Jarr’s adventures since Jarr predated them both. There was a time when Zeldar wished to keep a string of sharks teeth around his neck, just so he could pretend he had slain a demon army, but his stepmother had the necklace confiscated and ground up into dust. Zeldar had managed to save the string though, hiding it away in his room with another singular shark’s tooth he had smuggled inside the house from a trade he had made at school. There was an Aba foreign exchange student that had a collection, which was where he had gotten his first string of teeth.
But a nobleman was soft-spoken and not heroic at all. He had to learn his letters, practice his penmanship, and memorize all the mathematics tables and formulas by heart. Not only that, but he had to learn the glorious history of his noble lineage and recite his fathers by memory, all the way back to the mythic Quarr. Of course that everyone took as a joke for no one truly believed in the origin myths those days. No one believed in demons either. There had never been any archaeological proof, though some said that the Abele crossbreeds were demonic enough to prove their existence.
“Sir!” The herdsmen heard a voice call from down the hill.
All of them turned and glanced at Zeldar, who sat up and winced.
Peering down the hill irritably, Zeldar spotted one of the footmen from his father’s coach climbing up the hill in his smart suit coat and pressed pants. The footman’s shoes were ill suited to the rocky terrain and already the man seemed winded by the hike.
Reluctantly Zeldar called out, standing up and dusting himself off, “I’m here. What is it Yarrd?
The footman hurried up breathless and bowed at the young lord. “You must return to the lodge at once and change your attire, sir. Your father wishes to speak with you.”
Making a face with a backward glance at the others on the hill who were hiding their smirks, Zeldar returned his attention to the footman and said, “Need I change for my father? Why all the pomp? I don’t think he cares whether I am dressed as a herdsman or a baker’s boy. He never did before.”
“Your stepmother is also here,” the footman replied.
Zeldar winced and nodded. “I see. No doubt she is dressed in her utter best to survey the village and be superior and all.”
“Please sir, beware of your tone when speaking of her,” Yarrd warned with raised eyebrows.
“Oh, calm yourself,” Zeldar said, walking down the hill towards him. “I will not lose my inheritance by speaking ill of my stepmother. It isn’t scandalous enough, and everybody here knows I don’t like her anyway.”
“But word spreads,” the footman replied, now joining him on his journey down the hill. “And you don’t want my lady to hear an ill report in the mood she is already in.”
“What mood?” Zeldar asked, feigning indifference. However, the goat herders watched him quicken his pace. They knew his stepmother was cattish when she was filled with ire, and Zeldar did fear her somewhat still.
“She heard about your behavior at the end of the year at Brighthall. That fight you got into…” the footman said with a tone of warning. “Master Wil’s son was said to be sporting a black eye.”
Zeldar huffed, but now jogged down the hill, something the footman chased with pain in his shins. “Ferr Wil deserved it. The prick said something nasty about Brandarr’s daughter, and I wouldn’t have it.”
The footman stopped. “Brandarr? You don’t mean our country steward?”
“The very one,” Zeldar replied with a turn, walking backward before turning around again.
He jogged toward the path in the hill where he saw the parked pedicab that he knew Yarrd took to get there. They never rode off the hill path. That was the rule in the fields. Everything was to be on foot to preserve the terrain for the goats.
“What did he say about Darrii?” Yarrd asked, now feeling concerned.
“Nothing repeatable,” Zeldar replied, hopping into the driver’s seat.
The footman hurried to the vehicle and waved Zeldar back to the passenger’s seat. “Come on sir, you know you are not allowed.”
“Don’t be silly, Yarrd,” Zeldar returned, grasping the handlebars cheerfully. “I’ve steered these many times. I’ve become quite adept at it now, though I have had a tumble twice while learning.”
But the footman remained stationary, waving him still back to the passenger’s seat. “How would it look sir, if a young nobleman such as yourself, were driving the servant. It would be scandalous.”
“It would be novel, Yarrd,” Zeldar replied with a smirk. “Hop on in and quit dilly dallying.”
“I cannot,” the servant replied respectfully. “I would not be the instrument to you losing your inheritance.”
Zeldar made a face and huffed, climbing back into the passenger’s seat with resigned reluctance. He then leaned over the back of the driver’s seat and said, “I’ll humor you today…. But really Yarrd, it would take a scandal of magnanimous proportions for me to lose my inheritance. My grandfather was specific in his provisions of his will. I’d have to have an affair with another man’s wife or become some kind of national criminal for me to lose my lands. No body arrests a nobleman’s son for driving a pedicab.”
Still, the servant was quite satisfied once Zeldar moved. Yarrd climbed into the driver’s seat and started the motor at once.
They lifted off the ground lightly and hovered, resting only gently on the wheels that rolled on the path. It didn’t exactly fly. It wasn’t built for that. But the hover mechanism made it so that speed was more manageable and the shock of the road was almost nil. It was a great invention of the modern age, and Zeldar’s father bought several as soon as he knew the value of them.
The trip down the hill went swiftly, and Zeldar smiled as the wind whipped his hair about his face. It reminded him of something he felt in a dream he had forgotten, a pleasant dream he wished to have back. As they zoomed down over the rocks and the bumps, they went over hills and downward until they could see the fringes of their main estate, which held a small lodge of ten rooms. The edges of the trees that contained a walnut grove among the other fruit trees gleaned by the locals when they weren’t visiting, were now in view and Zeldar grinned broader.
He called forward to the footman, “Why did Stepmother come anyway? I thought she hated the fresh air of the country? Didn’t she swear she was going to reside in the city forever and die of lung cancer?”
The footman said nothing. It was safer not too. Despite Zeldar’s sincere friendliness with the servants and workers employed by his father, no one dared get too close to him when the stepmother was around. She took it as a sign of blasphemy committed by her stepson and the villainous peasant that dared step above their station to speak to him at all.
“Your silence is not encouraging,” Zeldar said after a while, and he leaned sorrowfully back into his seat.
The path took them through the groves. Zeldar watched the blur of the fruit pickers, their ladders and the colorful trees around them. They then zipped into the more open grasses of the lawn where the vehicle slowed down and settled on the gravel that made the drive. There, the family coach was parked with the driver seated reading a newspaper.
“Ho there, Dzhon!” Zeldar called out, standing up and smiling with a wave.
The driver looked up and nodded kindly to him.
“Is my father in or has he gone touring?” Zeldar asked, hopping off the pedicab. The footman followed him with a disapproving air at his familiar behavior, and his expression warned the driver to not be so familiar. He got the message.
“His lordship is in the manor, sir,” the driver said with an unusually polite bow.