Tales of the Zodiac - The Goat's Tale

The following is the first of twelve tales. Each tale documents the travails of a different protagonist. These people are drawn from all walks of life but they are linked together by both destiny and astrology.

I talk of destiny because not only are they the personification of their sun sign, they also stand together at the end of the world. In their own way, their actions will influence the course of human history. Each character represents their sun sign with the strengths and frailties characteristic of them. The truth, however, is that it will require their combined might to stand against the threat that faces them.

I begin with Ser Gruff, the Capricorn, the 'old man' of the Zodiac. It is a tale of guts and determination, of an almost pathological inability to give in. Without Ser Gruff, the twelve would never have met...

My history master is a frail old man, lost amongst sackcloth robes, with skin of an almost greenish hue. He looks and smells like something that one might find growing on a stale piece of bread, composed of little more than dust. Twenty years ago, when he was already unthinkably old, he was one of the most respected academics in the kingdom. This, sadly, is no longer true.

“Can somebody give me…” His voice, a hoarse whisper, dies as he loses his train of thought. I gaze out of the window, a narrow slit in the stone, to the grey drizzle outside.

“Can somebody give you what?!” sneers Tomos from the back of the class. There is a smattering of laughter from the easily amused boys around him. Quite why they are laughing is a mystery to me; it didn’t sound like much of a joke.

“Can somebody give me…” The old man starts again but the result is the same: his strained voice dying in the coldness of the room. After a brief silence, he begins to cough a cough so long and so harrowing that, for a moment, I worry he might be dying. I needn’t worry though; it is not the old man’s style to be
that
interesting.

“Sir, why don’t you sit down?” blusters the plump little blond boy at the front of the class. This particular boy is none other than Prince Libran, the heir to the throne. Though lacking in style, wit, intelligence and indeed all other princely attributes, he is nothing if not as gracious as one would hope the future king to be.

“I’ll go and get you a cup of water,” the prince continues, his voice at least an octave higher than it should be. He rises from his seat in the front of the class and whirls towards the door in a flourish of red and princely purple. His uniform, which singles him out as royalty, stands in marked contrast to the drabness of the room with its bare stone walls, high ceilings and poverty-stricken history master.

“Can somebody give me…” The history master begins again, neither sitting as suggested nor acknowledging the kind intervention of the prince. A slight ripple of laughter rumbles around the back of the class as he falters once more. I do not join in.

“Can somebody give me… an example of knowledge that we have lost?”

Having finally overcome his struggle, he wipes his brow, drops his head and shuffles over to a small wooden stool at the left of the slate board. The word ‘poo’ is written on his back in large chalk letters, no doubt put there by one of my more ambitious colleagues. And it gets worse for him. For even the act of sitting does not appear to be a straightforward one and he goes about it as awkwardly and stiffly as a normal man might go about petting a rabid dog. A silent fascination hangs over the class as he does this, the question apparently forgotten.

“How to sit down properly?!” comes yet another disappointing insult from the back of the room. It was perhaps Tomos again, but there are several of the same types back there and their mean-spirited bullying does not warrant a turn of the head to check. There are a few sniggers, again from the back of the class.

“I have forgotten more than you will ever know… Tomos. However, I was not referring to… myself. I was referring to… the human race as a whole. Knowledge that the
human race
has lost. Somebody tell… me.”

The master is now perched uncomfortably upon his stool and, as far as a man with greyish green skin can, seems to have regained some of his vitality. Nevertheless, an insolent silence hovers over the class.

“Plastic,” I sigh, excruciated.

“Plastic… Yes… Thank you, Gruffydd. And what was plastic used for?” he croaks. For him to remember my name is surprising. But what is not surprising is that, before I can reply, the back of the class interrupts once more. I cannot speak without their torment.

“The goat gets it again. Baaa… Baaa…”

For peasants such as me, mockery is inevitable in this class – a class filled with the sons of the wealthy and the highborn. I ignore it with the stubborn indifference that is as natural to me as kindness is to Prince Libran. The only thing I even register is a factual point: goats do not ‘baa’.

“Plastic was used for almost everything,” I reply, unable to muster even the slightest enthusiasm for the topic.

“Almost everything. Yes…  Almost everything… It would seem that everything. Almost everything, we now make out of wood, stone or metal… or wood… used to be made from stone. Pardon me… plastic… Why was that, do you think?”

The question is delivered in such stumbling and breathy terms that it is hard to tell whether he is asking for the purposes of education or because he genuinely doesn’t know. Yet another awkward silence hovers over the room.

Meanwhile, Prince Libran re-enters with a goblet of water, stealing our attention. By the standards of the  adolescent boys around him, he couldn’t be any more of a target; he creeps to the teacher, wears a custom-made uniform, and seems to be as far removed from pubescence as he was sixteen years ago. Yet, despite all this, he is untouchable.  There is certainly a lot to be said for being heir to the throne.

“Thank you, Your Highness. You’re a credit to your… father,” says the master. He takes the goblet and the concentration of doing so seems to be all-consuming. His grasp appears awkward and the sip he takes is both as unnatural and as eager as that of a man who has not drunk water for a very long time. My gaze returns momentarily to the narrow window in the stone and the grey drizzle outside.

“Now… Where were we?” the master croaks. Beads of water cling to his white beard.

“I believe you were talking about plastic, sir?” comes the prince’s chirrup of a reply as he returns to his seat in between his two cousins at the front of the class. The boy prince, all plump and blond and chirpy, plays the role of teacher’s pet to perfection. The effort he applies to his learning places him academically near the top of the class.

“Ah yes… Plastic. Now, Dafydd, can you please tell me what plastic was used for?” He turns his head to look not at Dafydd but instead at a boy named Howell, the prince’s cousin, who is sitting, as one would expect, dutifully next to Prince Libran. This gesture is so definite that neither Howell, whose eye contact he is seeking, nor Dafydd, sitting at the back right hand side of the class, know if they’re supposed to answer. The result, of course, is yet another uncomfortable silence.

“Well, Dafydd…” He continues, rising from his seat and staring fixedly at Howell. “It would seem that you have been neglecting your studies… I would like two thousand words on the uses of plastic on my desk by tomorrow morning.”

“Pardon me, sir, but are you talking to me? Or Dafydd?” squeaks Howell. He’s a small, timid boy with mousey brown hair and too many freckles.

The history master’s mouth opens and his eyes widen, bewildered by the question. Ever gracious, Prince Libran steps in.

“Pardon me, sir, but I think my cousin is simply confused. You see, you called him Dafydd, but Dafydd is sitting at the back of the class. It wasn’t that he couldn’t answer but that he didn’t know he was supposed to.” The prince’s tone is mild and diplomatic.

“And the goat already answered your question once anyway,” snipes Tomos, or someone, from the back of the class.

The history master wipes his brow once more. The exertion of rising from his seat combined with too many contributions from too many people is taking a visible toll on him. A wave of grumbles and sniggers surges around the room.

“Ah, yes, thank you… Err… Goat,” he stumbles, forgetting my name. Laughter erupts around me. Unfortunately, it is not at the master this time but at me. Through his own confusion rather than any malice on his part, he appears to have redeemed himself. Seemingly quite oblivious to the mockery and laughter around him, he simply carries on talking as though the class were silent. Perhaps to him it is.

“Gruffydd. For the purposes of His Highness, could you please repeat for me the uses of plastic?”

“I said that it was used for almost everything you can think of,” I reply.

“Ah… Yes….” he croaks, pretending to recall my previous answer. “Now, why do you think that is, Libran?” He turns his eyes to the plump young prince.

“Because it was more abundant and more durable than wood and metal?” The prince squeaks his answer in a tone that sounds as much like a question as the question itself. Before the answer has bounced off the stone wall and before the master can open his mouth again, the prince continues with his enquiry.

“No, no… We’d still have it if it was, wouldn’t we? Was it cheaper?” There is a brief pause. The prince’s voice grows higher and more confused. If I could see his cheeks, I imagine that they’d be redder than ever.

“But things are normally cheap because they’re abundant, aren’t they? So it can’t be that. Was it because it was waterproof? No. Metal, stone and wood are waterproof too. I d… don’t know... Was it because it was lighter?!” His last noise, the word ‘lighter’, is little more than a confused squeak.

However, his answer could be mistaken for cold, clear thinking when compared to the blank expression on the history master’s face. It has become clear recently that the befuddled patchwork of the old man’s brain is capable of holding no more than one idea at any given time; the rest of his conscious faculty is, instead, tied up in the increasingly difficult act of staying alive.

“Well… Young prince…” His words struggle out amongst deep, straining breaths. “I worry that you think
too
much. For you are correct. Plastic, I mean stone. No, plastic… appears to have been once cheaper and more abundant than most other… materials. It was also… light and waterproof…”

He coughs another of his terrible coughs whilst the class look on in silence. Some, like the prince, look on in sympathy. Some, like Tomos, look on in sadistic amusement. Others, like myself, perhaps only myself, look on in impatience. This man, undoubtedly once a great scholar, deserves retirement and reverence. Instead he stands here, without dignity, sabotaging my education one exasperatingly laboured breath at a time.

“Young Dafydd, could you please tell me… what substance it was… that plastic was made from?” His old face, serious as the grave, looks, once more, straight into the eyes of Howell. This time, Howell answers, not daring to embarrass the master another time.

“Oil, sir,” squeaks the freckled boy. He is perhaps the only boy in the class less advanced towards puberty than his royal cousin.

“Ahh… An excellent answer, Dafydd.” His eyes brighten at the mention of the substance. “Oil…” He lets the word roll off his tongue, and it does so easily. The word is uttered with such reverence that it is clear he feels it is something we should all be equally entranced by. For us, though, it is nothing but a phantom; an extinct substance from an ancient age. As foreign to us now as the skies beyond and the seas below.

“Oil… Tomorrow, we shall discuss oil…”

We studied oil only a month ago and it is to my intense frustration that this decision is not a deliberate or logical choice of lesson, but rather a product of the chaos of the old man’s broken mind. To my further frustration is the certainty that, when tomorrow comes, he will remember nothing of today’s lesson and that its content could be literally anything.

Whilst my mind broods, the class around me jump from their seats and hurry from the cold, stone room as fast as they can. Today, the energy of the exit is even more exuberant than normal and, for a change, is not entirely related to the end of the class. The reason is that it is time for the final leg of ‘The Prince Libran Cup’. Even I am mildly excited. Nevertheless, I walk out alone. There is no one to share my mild excitement with.