The Winter King

Chapter 1 - The End of Summer

On other worlds they say that a season lasts less than a year, while on Thierry they mark out a man's life. Why this should be I couldn't say. I was an Autumn child and like all of my generation I began my life as the Great Summer faded and the Clans began the great southwards to the Winter home at Stromlo. Autumn children are thin and pale, as a rule, with great dark eyes, filled with romantical notions and strange whimsies, great artists, poets, and warriors, and great lovers. Still, all Thierins are great lovers, of course.

When I was a boy life was filled with a great sense of impermanence. The silk pavilions of Zeme were being taken down and stored in caves against the onset of Autumn. Summer alliances and marriages were being brought to a close, some smoothly and gracefully, others with violent passion and storms of anger which might even grow into feuds to last through the Winter and perhaps beyond. One by one the Houses were packing their wagons and taking the south road to Stromlo. Soon Zeme, that great city of the summertime would be no more and the Autumn winds would once more play across the empty grass of the high plain.

My first memory is of leaf-fall. I must have been, perhaps, four or five years old. I was taken outside by my nurse, who was a female relative of low estate, and found to my surprise that all the trees in the courtyard had begun to shed their red leaves, which lay on the ground in a thick carpet, filling me with wonder.

"Are the trees going to die, Nurse?" I asked.

"No, of course not." she laughed. "It's only leaf-fall, the trees shall sleep through the Great Winter, as we shall at Stromlo." Of course to her, a summer child of perhaps twenty years of age the sight must have been as unusual as it was to me. But adults have a magical ability to make the strange and wondrous seem perfectly normal and expected. Or at least, Summer adults do, and when I was a child they were virtually all the adults I knew.

When I was eight preparations were virtually complete for our migration. Most of our possessions were packed, most of our houses had been stored away and many of our people were already living in their wagon-homes, ready for the move to begin in the next year, or the one after that. My father gave me a gift then that was to change my life, or at least set it in it's course, in what seemed like an uncharacteristic display of affection at the time. He gave me Brightfoot, my first Windsteed and my first love. Of course, looking back it may not have been affection which prompted this, but rather good business sense, or merely convention, since our family have always masters of the breeding of horses. Whatever prompted the gift it had it's due effect. Next to women, horses have always been the love of my life.

Brightfoot was a Pegasso colt, a stallion, just weaned. The downy feathers on his wings were just molting but his chocolate brown fur was rich and warm. It was love at first sight. I've never been able to understand how anyone could look into those beautiful dark eyes of a thoroughbred Windsteed and not feel love, but some people manage it. I never could.

I suppose that I must tell you something of my family, if only to prevent terminal confusion. Besides my nurse, whose name was Elliya, there were my honored father and mother, of whom I saw very little. My father's name was Don Estragon Phillipe de Souza, and my mother was the Donna Marina. Like most Autumn and Winter children I was a single child. Not for us the sprawling broods of Spring and Summer! Family, to me, was a vast collection of Uncles and Aunts, a small circle of cousins and friends, and the ever present multitudes of servants, all busy at their appointed tasks.

My best friend has always been my cousin Vanji, we were always rivals at everything, from horse breeding to the pursuit of women, but I get ahead of my tale. Vanji was my own age almost to the day. We shared the pale good looks and dark hair and eyes that made our nut-brown Summer Aunts with their blue eyes and golden hair cluck and fuss over us so.

As well as Vanji there was my cousin Sesily, and her friend Ovina and their waiting-maid Pia. They all had hair and eyes of ebony, typical of Autumn children, but the maid's hair was curly and her coarser features spoke of her lower-class heritage. Her mother had been a servant of my aunt Dravina - Sesily's mother - and when she'd died giving birth my aunt decided to take the child and raise her as maid and companion to my cousin. There were several other boys of my class in the immediate household, my cousins Olaf and Artaro, and two or three others who were more distant relatives or perhaps who were forstered by my family in the typical careless child swapping of the minor noble classes. 

Brightfoot was a yearling, and I suppose I might have been eight when the day appointed for moving finally came about. By then the family pavillions had long been dismantled and stored underground and we had already been living for some weeks or months in our journey wagon with it's bowed roof and barrel shape. Our wagon was painted blue and shaped much like a barrel. It was by far the smallest quarters I've ever lived in, although mostly we pitched tents for sleeping in when the weather was fair. The wagon was pulled by two immense draught Pegasso, their silver wings merely for show, being far to small to support such immense creatures in flight. By moving day there was nothing left of the family comploud but some paving stones and some rather forlorn trees growing in the middle of the steppes, all else had been stored underground. 

It took most of that first day to harness the draught beasts and wagons, and to chase up recalcitrant women and children and drunks, to arrange the order of travel and make speeches. I doubt that we made even five mles that first day. It was an immensely exciting time, the first change in a life marked by it's changes, or perhaps the second if you count Leaf-fall? By dusk we have left my old home at Zeme far behind, several miles at least, and the caravan pulled into a circle and fires were lits and tents pitched. Suddenly - despite all the years of preparations - our sedentry existence on the high Steppe was transformed into the nomadic existence of the migration. Dark eyed Autumn children and our golden brown Summer parents listened anew to the tales of our Spring elders, and the few pale and silvery Winter ancients among us, tales of the northern trek and the raising of silken Zeme above the Steppe in the long ago days of Spingtime.