A Bard's Tale - Forty Lashes

He wasn't very old, all things considered. Seventeen, give or take a year. Probably take; he wasn't all that old, he knew. walking from village to village, telling stories at the taverns and listening to old men's tales. Girls were still a fairly new thing then, drawn to the sound of his voice, his air of far-away, the fact that he wouldn't be around the next morning to cause too much gossip.

It was a pretty village; he remembered that, too, though he couldn't - now - remember its name. In the spring its hills were a riot of flowers, soon cropped short by the cattle, goats, and sheep. The winds had been high, that year; he remembered the multicolored petals, tugged about on the winds, and the way it bit through the thin cloth of his cloak. The wind pinked the cheeks of the dairymaids - who, it must be said, had an impressive grip he came to respect - and the scent of flowers and flying petals made things...beautiful. It didn't make life easier - it just rearranged matters so that nobody really minded the work for a while. The sort of time that Taran had already learned to tuck away in a corner of the heart somewhere, to remember when beauty had gone somewhere else for a while.

And he'd stayed, because it was beautiful. Stayed just a day too long.

That day, that morning, he wasn't going to forget.

He'd wrangled a room, the night before, by telling stories in the tavern for half the night and several sweet words to the various tavern-maids. He hadn't been prepared for the guardsmen to kick said door in (his first thought was thank the Light I was tired enough to go to bed alone) and grab him as he was rolling out of bed. He wasn't surprised to hear them tell him he was under arrest - if anything, his view of the matter was an arrogant, of course I am, you couldn't possibly go beating in everyone's doors at random - but the angry sarcasm was bitten off well before it was given voice; as they hauled him bodily down the stairs, they told him what for.

Sleeping with the Baron's daughter? Getting her with child? ''What? I've never even met her!'' And it wouldn't have made any difference if he had. Touching noble daughters was a very good way to - well, a very good way to get guards beating your door in, actually, among very many other less pleasant things that his bardic imagination was all too ready to supply.

Sheer shock kept Taran's tongue still - rising panic got him a few solid punches and kicks from hands and feet that wore metal, but he was still struggling as the guards hauled him to the center of the village. There was a news post there...bare of notices today, but sporting a nice set of chains it didn't usually have. Oh, no. No, no, no. Taran was big for his age - big for any age - and it took several solid strikes to regions best left to the bawdier ballads before the guards got him on his knees, trying hard to remember what that breathing trick was, as his lungs didn't seem to want to work.

"Ah," said a voice. "Got him, then? Into the chains."

Breathing was proving rather too arduous an adventure; Taran felt himself yanked upward, his tunic and cloak pulled off him as cold iron was bound about his wrists. There was a rising sense of unreality - he hadn't done anything (well, he had, but not what he was being accused of) and nothing looked like leading to anything good and he still couldn't breathe and ten minutes ago he'd been asleep and -

"By the word of my daughter, this is the villain who forced himself upon her and brought shame upon her and upon my house," said that voice, and Taran forced himself to focus enough to identify the speaker - yes, the local lord. Had to be, freelanders never wore the circlets, or that much gold, or -

He blinked. That was his daughter? The little blond thing, her belly just showing the signs, yes. He'd left her alone, pregnant girls usually had possessive lovers somewhere about, and she'd been wearing silks, and his ears caught his attention. The baron hadn't stopped speaking while he was identifying people, and the words, "Forty lashes upon his bare back," had just hit all the internal alarm systems.

No. No, no, no, no- Scared now, very scared, he tugged rather uselessly on those irons. All around, the once-friendly faces of the villagers were hard as stone, hard as flint. A very distant part of his mind, a small corner that wasn't panicking, took note of that. Villagers liked a good show, but they weren't liking this. He's lying, you know he's lying, you know I didn't -

The first strike of that whip on his skin could have been lightning. The sudden pain of it made every thought stop at once, carved the scene before him in a brief moment of absolute clarity. A single note in the silence; a cry of pain that must have been his own. Then a faint whir of leather in the air, a crack -

At times such as these, any man's mind reaches outward, looking for loopholes, looking for escape. Taran's mind was much better than most at reaching outward; as the whip struck again it shattered some internal wall, some barrier between himself and the world.

If the whip hadn't kept striking him, there'd have been no 'him' left there at all.

The villagers knew he was innocent. Everyone knew he was innocent. It didn't matter to anyone, however, because they also knew who was guilty; clear in several minds was a face, clear in many more a name - a son of another baron, in a village not so many miles away. The freelanders hated him, the baron here disapproved of him. His daughter, of course, adored him.

Taran was to be the example. He was the baron's refusal to allow his daughter's pregnancy to force a marriage. He was the baron's example to his daughter; clear in his mind the bardling saw the punishment he had in mind for her. Not so public, but no less vicious.

Taran couldn't even ask 'why me?' He knew why. He couldn't not know why. But it didn't make it right, and it didn't make it fair, and the whip came down again, and again, and again. He couldn't get away from the knowledge that this was the baron's idea of mercy - Taran was a rogue to him anyway, this an object lesson of the consequences of his wandering life; his innocence was all that kept him from being executed for the crimes of another. It was the look of the thing, that was the thought that kept repeating in the baron's mind. The look of the thing, what people thought...

All at once, the pain stopped. The strikes of the whip ceased, shadows blurred the bright morning sun and the manacles let him go. Without their support, Taran dropped to the dirt, panting, his throat aching from the screams. It took far, far too much effort to push himself up. Not one villager moved - nor would they, he knew, until the baron and his pregnant daughter had left.

He looked at them. Blankly; even with their auras, their thoughts, their feelings laid out to him, it still felt like they were very far away. A clarity settled in his own mind, an awareness that was no more escapable than all the other things that had crowded into his mind.

''I am more than you. The world will know my name and respect it, and you will never be more than you are now.''

And then, mercifully, the world went entirely black.

Some time later he woke to find himself in a bed, dressed, with a whole roll of bandages (it felt like) wrapped around his torso and stomach, and the sting of salve between. He stared at the ceiling a while before realizing they'd returned him to the room they'd hauled him from. The door was still a bit broken.

What a curious thing was mercy. What a curious thing was guilt.