Title: The Bastard's Portion
Author: Sunfalling
Fandom: Shakespeare-King Lear
Rating: PG-13
My father takes pleasure in telling a certain story of my infancy. The day he held me in his arms for the first time, inspecting my features, I reached out and wrapped one tiny hand in his beard, gripping it tightly. His attendants were hard pressed to remove the thick hairs from my grasp.
"The little bastard is indeed my son," my father said, laughing. "He declares it with his very fist."
Soon after my birth, my mother died of weakness and fever, unwed, unrecognized, and only ever mentioned in my father's bawdy jokes. I, however, lived on in the Earl of Gloucester's great house as a recognized son and brother to his legitimate child, Edgar. I never felt unwelcome there but from the beginning, I knew my place as the unnatural son, forever beneath my brother. "Young Gloucester," they called my brother, while I remained "Master Edmund," or, in lesser company, simply "The Bastard."
I will be the first to say that Edgar is a good, loyal son but he shall never be fit to be an earl. He is weak and painfully naïve when it comes to judging men, relying on useless codes of morality and trust. He spends his days working in the stables with the grooms and playing in the fields with the servants' children like little foxes in the rustling wheat. He mimics the calls of the birds and the baying of our father's prized hounds, much to their delight. I hear his voice yelping in the distance and I laugh inside myself. When he smiles at me with his crooked teeth, I cannot help but smile back, marveling at his inferiority.
For his thirteenth birthday, my brother receives a glossy little bitch pup with a shining pelt and bright, intelligent eyes.
"She should bear some fine litters if you train her well," our father tells Edgar. "One day, you must lead the king's hunt every year, as I have."
My brother doesn't seem to hear his words. He kneels, embracing the little hound, and rubs his face against the top of her silky head as she wriggles in his arms.
"Tis a fine gift, Father," I say, because Edgar is too engrossed in his prize to offer a word of thanks. I smile silently and easily, watching the pleasure in my brother's hands as he runs them over the smooth hair, his gangly body shivering with excitement.
Our father warns Edgar to keep the pup shut up at night. It is late spring and nearing the season for sheep-shearing so the shepherds are bringing their flocks close to the manor. The protective sheepdogs might tear an unwary pup to pieces and recent heavy rains have created another hazard, flooding the river that runs nearby.
"I've named her Bela," my brother tells me and I laugh at his foolishness. One simply doesn't name a breeding bitch. The pup runs to and fro between us when we take her out to play, soaking up our affection equally. Whenever Edgar sits, she rushes to clean his ears, rendering him helpless with laughter. The next time we take her out in the courtyard, I've rubbed venison grease from the kitchen on my hands and Edgar cannot understand why his hound is so eager to lick my palms, ignoring his calls entirely. "She truly loves you," he says, wonderingly.
I shrug to show indifference. "She's your dog."
Edgar sits back on his heels in the damp earth and rubs his knuckles over his lips. "Surely father will give you a hound of your own when you turn thirteen," he tells me confidently. "Until then, let's share Bela. She can be half yours and half mine."
I want to tell him that he's an affected little fool and that it is impossible to own half a dog, but I only tip my head graciously. "That is truly generous of you, Brother."
The pup whimpers as my fingers dig deeply into the loose skin of her throat. Edgar chews on a rough stem of grass, whining back at her to capture her attention. Bits of grass stick to his lips and I can barely watch him. This is the boy who is to be Earl of Gloucester and the godson of the king himself.
When I was five, I asked my father why the king wasn't my godfather as well. He told me a light-hearted story about how Princess Cordelia, still a child at my birth, had offered to be my godparent, since I didn't have one. Father didn't answer my question then, but I already knew the truth. Cordelia was only kind because, like Edgar, she was too childish to understand the cruel reality of the human world, with its convoluted rules based on blood and ceremony.
I last saw Cordelia at the wedding celebration for her sister, Regan. At sixteen, Cordelia seemed small and fragile with earnestly pretty features and a voice so soft it could barely be heard over the hum of the crowd. I noted that her elder sisters were less attractive, but they wore bright gowns, at least, and put on the airs of royalty. They knew their high stations and showed it clearly. Regan wore a golden chain about her neck with a jeweled pendant the size of a small apple. Goneril, the eldest princess and wife to the Duke of Albany, approached me and presented herself, mistaking me for my brother. "You look much like your father, but are far fairer," she murmured.
I bowed low and offered an apology. "I am only Edmund, my lady, the bastard son. My brother, Edgar, stands yonder." I pointed him out among the raucous crowd of the king's knights. Edgar was entertaining them by imitating their accents and adopting comical voices. The rancid smell of ale and burnt meat hovered about them.
"Oh," Goneril said. Her reddened mouth drew tight in a perplexed bud. "Such a pity." I reveled in her obvious disappointment. A blind man could see that Edgar was no proper heir to the estate, He wore the colors of our house but his hair was coarse and wild, his cheeks still smudged with grime from the stable or field. Where my face is smooth and well proportioned, his brow is too broad, his nose woefully long, and a gap winks between his bottom teeth that he used to spit water through in contests with the stable boys. As he stood with the knights, twisting his face into foolish expressions, he looked for all the world like a lowly peasant server come to bring them more beer.
As I watched him, I felt Goneril's hand on the back of my neck. Her cool fingers brushed idly against the sensitive skin there. "How many years have you? Fourteen?"
"Twelve, my lady" I replied levelly. Her interest set my mind turning over with questions, but I am not one to turn down the favor of a highborn woman.
Goneril made a soft sound in her throat. "In a few years you must come serve in my father's court," she said. "You appear to be a very capable young man, Edmund."
"My father sends me to learn a trade in the fall," I told her. "I fear I shan't be back for several years." I lowered my head to indicate my sadness.
Goneril's hand dropped and she sighed. "More's the pity that your birth makes you thrall to an old man's whims."
She has little to fear. I have learned that, without a son, King Lear may divide his kingdom between his three daughters before his death. Happy women! Clearly it is better to be born a girl than a bastard.
"I'd like to be a knight," Edgar told me after the feast, "or maybe an actor."
"You shall be an earl," I told him firmly, and the words stung like bitter birch ash crumbling on my tongue.
I practice my swordplay daily, for it is the one area in which Edgar surpasses me. After a session, I go to the little stream that runs down to the river and wash the sweat from my body. The sun is high and hot. I sit on the warm stone wall in my breeches with my damp tunic drying in my hands. The thick smell of summer rises from my father's green fields, stretched out before me, thick with fragrant clover. Sheep graze on the hillsides and the apples are bronzing in the orchards beyond the grain. In a few turns of the moon I will leave this place, sent to a strange city to study figures and numbers, working long hours as a lowly apprentice in a merchant's store. Someday I will return, a learned man, to work for Edgar as a faithful steward of my brother's wealth.
"Won't that be a fine thing?" my father asked when he explained the arrangement to me, and I answered that yes, indeed, it would. An unfortunate star shone over my conception and birth, he told me, yet he knows I am blessed to have made the most of it in life.
In the wild of nature, there are no laws of inheritance. In a feral order, the strongest beast will seize control through cunning and force, and rightly so, for he has proven himself the most fit to rule. This is simply the path the world turns in, the relentless, merciless struggle for survival in the natural sphere. I will not die of the mortal weakness in my mother nor live in the pleasant blindness of my father. God of the green earth as my witness, I will never bow to the ignorance of my brother.
At night, after Edgar retires to bed, I open the door to his chamber and slip out with Bela. Delighted, she follows me to the bank of the river, drawn by the smell of the greasy pig's ear in my hand. We halt on the edge of the steep bank and I drop the slippery ear at her feet, rubbing her velvety ears. She licks the slick flesh madly, unconcerned with the movement of my hand, slender tail swinging wide, eager arcs.
Reaching down, my stronger hand closes over the handle of the club I left here earlier in the day. The first time I bring it down hard against her skull, she yelps suddenly at the pain and struggles to keep her balance. Determined, I swing a second heavy blow and hear her bones crack against the dense wood. I continue beating her helpless form until she is silent at last, sprawled on the dry grass. Then I lift her small, limp body and drop it into the fast current of the river, followed by the pig's ear and the club. The chalky moon illuminates a flash of dull golden-brown hair bobbing in the dark water before the current pulls it out of sight. Sweet and damp, the dewed grass cleans the blood from my hands. Standing, I feel for the first time how dizzyingly wonderful it is to be loved completely by something and still contain the power to destroy it.
The disappearance of the bitch is blamed on Edgar's carelessness, of course. He weeps openly when her body is found several days later, washed up downstream and half-eaten by wild beasts. Privately, I wonder whether the remaining flesh rotting on the river stones is his half or mine.