THE DESPERATE CHILD

Set in ancient times, a pretty girl needing to escape...

Natalie lived at a time lost to recorded history, when little kingdoms flourished and although there were sovereign kings, behind them and secretly mightier were bishops and priests and even wandering monks.

Natalie genuinely thought she was happy, but then she had very little to measure happiness by. She didn’t really know how old she was, though aware that most adults were a lot taller than she was so that some even banged their heads on the shack roof, and that her mother occasionally cooed that she’d put on this or that amount of height or girth in such and such a time, and wasn’t she becoming a big girl? In a later age she would have been called a ten to twelve year old, but in her own time all that size meant that meant she was quite old enough to help on the land and grow food for the family, and producing food may be supposed to make her happy, but there must have been something wrong with her, because it didn’t.

Home for Natalie was a shack. Even in his more inventive moods her father couldn’t find anything other than the word shack in order to describe the single room where they all slept with the pig, though when he was in a sullen mood he called it a sty. Which just about said it all.

Nights were the worst because there was mum, dad, sisters one, two, and three together with brother all squashed into a space that simply wasn’t big enough for all of them, and when her parents wanted to play the little games that made mum squeal and dad grunt most of the youngsters got squashed. But not Natalie. She was capable of working things out for herself.

She might not have been fully grown, but Natalie had caught the eye of Master Thomassen, the son of the only person in the village where she lived who actually went to a proper home with a hall and a door that shut tightly and windows and even a proper chimney, but she couldn’t stand the sight of him because he was really a lot bigger than she was and his father rode about looking all haughty and threatening anyone who didn’t seem to be worn to a frazzle through having to work too hard on his land. And when it took his fancy he would even strike them with anything that came to hand if he felt like it, and there wasn’t one thing anyone could do about it because this was his manor, he was its lord, and if he answered to anyone it was to the king. That same king never came their way unless there was a war brewing, and then he would beg or borrow or even steal as many young men as he could so that he had an army.

It would be only an army of sorts, and if you were one of the men who was forced to join it the chances were that you would leave the only land you knew anything about, and most likely never return because you’d be dead.

Thomassen was becoming a nuisance. He really enjoyed sneaking up on Natalie and poking her where dad said he really shouldn’t, and the very sod of it all was dad assumed it was all her fault if Thomassen came up to here sneakily and put his hand firmly between her legs, where such things were forbidden. Her dad would then beat her, he was good at that if anything happened that might upset their simple way of life, and after she had stopped crying he would then take her to one side and tell her exactly why he had beat her.

“That lad’s a bad ‘un lass,” he would growl, “but not for the likes of you or me, so when you try to push him away you’re goin’ against nature, and that’s summat a lass must never do because we’re here to serve his lordship, and if his lordship’s swine of a son wants to get between your legs, lass, then between your legs you must let him go…”

And Natalie was only (probably) ten years old whilst Thomassen was a lot older. Possibly. He’d have known his own age in years being the lord of the manor’s son, but ordinary peasant kids didn’t because there’s no fun in counting years, just suffering the cold seasons because they were too cold and the hot seasons because they were too hot.

So Natalie did as she was told and started, as a consequence, to put on weight. When her dad noticed that he decided to give her a gentle beating because, well, if she was in the family way and if the lord did find out there might be some advantage to them all. Or, on the other hand, there might not.

Thomassen knew all right what it was that made the pretty little Natalie put on weight. Of course he did! He’d enjoyed the games, and they’d played them so many times at his own instigation and under the promise of dire punishment if she didn’t do what he wanted, and there would most likely have been something amiss if she wasn’t swelling.

Then he caught her behind the cess pit in the far field where all the foul stuff was turned into good stuff and fed onto the land, and he taunted her.

“You been up to naughties, then, Natalie?” he asked, “with a lad? Your brother maybe, you been doing stuff with your brother. Wait till my dad your lord finds out, and I’ll tell him and then all your family will be cast away, because you, sleep with a pig, for goodnss sake! Who ever heard of Christian girls who sleep with pigs?”

“It was you, master Thomassen,” she replied, defensively, but that was something that the lad didn’t want to hear because hadn’t his stern master warned him against messing around with the scum off the fields? Was it not true that he was made aware that his whole future would be in disarray if he so much as thought of the filthy harlots who tilled the soil for them.

“I’ll tell my lordship father what you just said, and you’ll be hanged from the gibbet for your insolence!” he snapped.

And Natalie knew that could happen. The lives of the serfs were totally owned by his lordship, and if he said a life was to be forfeited, then so be it: a life would be forfeited. There was nothing anyone could say or do that would change matters. It was the way of the world. So if she made it known that Master Thomassen had not put her with child, well, what could she do but pretend it was her own brother, or, and she’d heard about these, a virgin birth. Not that she knew what the word virgin meant.

There was only one thing for her to do, only a single option, and she took it.

One night when her bump was getting to be the talk of the village she sneaked out, past her sleeping family, all of them, even the brother who was resting against the wary pig, the brother she was supposed to have done things with, though she had only the vaguest idea what things they may be and knew she’d done nothing of the sort.

And she made her way on the darkest of nights, intending to go as far from their home as she could get in one night and sleep through the light of the next day, cosily somewhere unseen by man or beast.

That was the plan, and it was the king who changed it, for he had left his castle and was on the lookout for the makings of an army because it was well over a year since his last war and he was missing the sounds of battle, the howling of the dying, and the weeping of boys too young to fight and certainly too young to die.

And as she slept in the shadows of shrubs and brambles by an eerie coincidence the king came upon her in the very first light of the first full day of freedom when she wanted to sleep her weariness away. She had struggled through the night, but when the moon was covered by cloud she could see very little if anything at all, and her progress had been minimal. So by the dawn she was still within spitting distance of her home village, but her misfortune lay in the king’s refusal to accept that he was losing his eyesight and was on the verge of being blind.

And the royal party paused as they dragged wearily along, and he pointed at where she lay. And what he saw was not young pregnant Natalie but a boar. And he insisted that it was a boar even when one of his knights pointed out that it was a child, and a girl child at that.

“Are you blind?” roared the king. “there are no kidlings round here! Can you not see what I can see? A boar wounded and ready for roasting?”

When she heard that, Natalie leapt to her feet and would have run like the wind, but her belly was heavy and she fell to the ground, sobbing.

“My child,” she whispered in between sobs, “my virgin birth…”

Then a man in the robes and wearing the mitre of a bishop shuffled through the army that was bristling with weapons and reeked of blood-stained testosterone, and held a hand up.

“Sire,” he rumbled, “it is written… there will be a second coming, the words are clear in ancient texts that only the wise can decipher, but he will come to give us succour in battles, to diminish our foe until all this broad land is ours…”

“So what?” roared the king, impatient and in the need of nourishment, “I am your king and I hunger. That boar lying there will roast fine if the Master of the Flames creates fire for us!”

The bishop pushed him in the chest, a thing only a man of God dared do to a king in times when absolute power was in divided hands. “You fool!” he rasped, “can you not see or are your eyes so blighted that what other men see is obscured to you by infirmity? You would destroy our lives and our futures by slaughtering this precious virgin?”

An argument raged and Natalie had heard enough. When it was clear that nobody was taking the least notice of her she sneaked away, dissolved invisibly into the shadows of dawn, and made her way to the route she’d struggled along when she’d crawled through the night..

Her home under the rule of an intemperate lord together with a father in possession of a firm hand would be a better option than the machinations of a blind king and an over-zealous bishop.

And what on Earth might a virgin be anyway? Maybe Thomassen could tell her if he was still her friend and wanted to play some of his games.…

© Peter Rogerson 11.05.23

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