The Fog - Part I

There lay a thin, wispy mass of fog on the ground, barely noticeable. The clouds lay thick above, only a few distant mountaintops penetrating the cotton sheet, like a spear through a man’s chest. Restauld sat inside his lonesome cottage, downing what was left of his wine at a fearsome pace. Yet he was calm, waiting for the Lords to arrive. He’d been looking forward to, and dreading, this day, when Lord William Mortimer, Lord Eustace Grant and Lord Hugh Stafford, formal owner of the Bayeux archipelagos, were to visit and inspect Knyfe Island, where Restauld was the sole inhabitant. ‘Tenant’ they called him; they had made it out as if tending to an island alone was a noble task. They had even offered him a knighthood, though he’d refused it. A knighthood hardly meant a thing nowadays, Restauld thought. He had seen boys, craven and green, knighted: boys who wouldn’t know a good sword lest it spike their gut. You say a few empty words, some highborn fool or other holds a sword to your shoulder and you demand being called Sir all the bloody time, as if it meant something. No, Restauld had no mind to lump himself in with their kind.


And so it was that he acted as the sole "tenant" of Knyfe, fifth largest island in the greater Bayeux archipelagos, and by far the least pleasant one to tend to. The conditions on Knyfe were far from ideal; the air was thick and humid in the summer, and thin and piercing in the winter. The weather gods were none too shy about snow, either, Restauld reflected bitterly while staring into his empty flagon of wine. He’d no longer bothered with cups; who would be around to witness and take offense at his lack of manners? He had tried to maintain his manners for the first year or so; after all, what if he forgot how to be decent by the time he returned to mainland? He chuckled, now, just thinking about the naivety he possessed back in the first year. He had still believed all the nonsense about nobility and the honour of tending to an island, and he had struggled slightly just refusing the knighthood. Green as grass, Restauld thought, granting himself a wry smile. He looked about the kitchen area of his cottage. The little brick cottage, his place of residence, and the only thing that could be called a ‘house’ on all of Knyfe, had been one of the greatest disappointments upon his arrival at the island. The walls were cracking, and several bricks were missing, leading to a damned lethal chill in the winter. The straw and earth roof was easily soaked through, and during the heaviest rain it might as well not have existed, for all the good it did. The cottage was slightly larger than mainland peasant houses, Restauld admitted, but he was no damned peasant, and were he to live here for however long the fat, rich lords wished him to, he would do so in better conditions than this. He had learned quickly the futility of asking for better living quarters; almost every pigeon he had sent had been ignored, without fail. Only two of them had ever received response, both of them polite refusals to send more supplies or send masons to brush up the cottage.

But today, when the three lords arrived… yes, that would be different. He had not seen another living soul, aside from rats and other wildlife, for four years. In fact, he had developed a habit of talking and singing to himself. I could earn my living on song, when I get back, Restauld mused. He had to earn some coin one way or another once he was back on mainland, whenever that happened to be. His pay for tending to Knyfe was good, but it couldn't possibly last him the rest of his life, or so he assumed. Presently, Restauld realized the lords and their company would arrive in a few short hours, and scrambled from his chair by the little wooden table, to make himself look as knightly as possible for when they came. The irony of such a venture was not lost on him, but one did not present oneself as anything less when addressing Houses of such stature.

Restauld had never been an impressively handsome man, but his age did him no favours, either. His forty-eighth birthday had been just weeks earlier, and it showed; he had long, thin, greasy black hair that hung mostly to one side of his face, the other side left sparsely populated. He was large, two meters and eleven centimetres tall, and broad-shouldered, with a semi-permanent scowl, always lingering just below the surface. His beard had grown for a while, and he did not intend on ridding himself of it anytime soon. Winter was drawing near, and shaving off what amounted to protection against the biting winds was not something Restauld had a mind to do. He dressed in the most formal clothes he could find, though they were still fairly old and smelt strongly of must. He had to gather firewood, too, he remembered. It would hardly do to have three great lords freezing in his old cottage, and though Restauld thought they all could use a taste of what his life was like, he usually found that people were more easily persuaded when they were not shivering with cold. And he certainly would have to be persuasive, were they to give him a pennyworth’s more supply than what he regularly received. After dressing, he grabbed hold of his bastard blade, which rested in a dusty old corner of the dressing room, and sharpened it for a while, mentally sorting through the appeals and requests he would make to Lord William, Eustace and not least of all Hugh, formal owner of all the Bayeux islands, lest he forget. Eventually his mind drifted off to memories of war and combat, to a time when he had got to use his bastard sword, a gift from his father that he received at the age of seventeen, for its intended purpose.

When he was twenty-four, he fought in the Bloody Land wars, which had started as a petty dispute over land between the Hatchet and Nelon families, and which turned into the bloodiest conflict of the century. At some point the dispute had escalated beyond imagination, and both houses called upon their allied houses for aid. The house of Hatchet marshaled the Painels, Mortimers, Ygous and Ferrers, while the house of Nelon rallied the Herberts, Sidneys, Talbots and Stanleys. After three months of cold war and negotiations (save for the occasional skirmish), the two armies clashed in Morty Fields, the piece of land that the whole damned war had been about from the beginning. House Nelon and their allies swept the field with stronger men, better positioning and superior strategy, and it was said that the Morty Fields were so soaked with blood that it stains the ground to this day, making the lands infertile. Restauld, being of house Stanley, was on the winning side from the start, though he still suffered two blows to his legs and back that left him crippled for several months. Even then, Restauld was apt with a blade, and was improving by the day. Since the Bloody Land wars, he had fought in half a dozen other battles and slaughtered more than his fair share of men.


And this is my reward, he reflected while he ground the whetstone. Restauld looked out his shabby window. The fog was rising, thickening.