Cholarian food was, in general, very good. We’d all been on enough worlds to easily adjust to, and appreciate, different cuisines, and considered the chefs in our respective households exceptionally fine practitioners of their craft. Even the everyday meals they prepared were of high calibre, and they positively outdid themselves whenever there was something to celebrate, such as Lord Verim’s fortieth year as Cholar’s High Chancellor. We weren’t invited to the late-night state dinner paying tribute to that but did get to go to some of the parties the palace threw for various festivals.
We also attended the gala family meal Tolith and Galya put on when one of Arlyne’s paintings was chosen for an exhibition showcasing the work of up and coming young artists. Kirsty, Simon, and I all tucked in enthusiastically, but Arlyne herself was too pleased and excited to eat much.
Less formal, but still tasty food, was supplied for the picnic hampers our guardians took to Chorathase Park on Beom’s Day, a planet-wide statutory holiday. Besides commemorating the birth of Beom, Beom’s Day marked the official start of summer and the royal family traditionally spent it in Chorathase Park. Many of their subjects did too, but were respectful of the royals’ privacy, content to wave to them from their own day camps. It was a popular place for camping and hiking, but such activities were restricted to the park, which was in the wilderness’s relatively safe recreational zone. Beyond it, Chorathase was not considered safe. Several mountains were impassable, sections of forest impenetrable, stretches of the main river swift and perilous, and some of the plants and wildlife extremely dangerous. With only a few exceptions, people were forbidden to go past certain points.
Exceptions included naturalists like Mardis, who routinely took their lives in their hands for the sake of their work, and suitably skilled adventurers who went in with experienced guides like Brak and Grak’s grandparents. For everyone else, the recreational zone provided a challenging enough outdoor experience. The whole of Chorathase was a wildlife preserve and all the furred, feathered, and finned denizens within it, protected. (Except from each other, the laws of nature being allowed to play out.) Hunting and fishing were prohibited in both sections, and anyone wanting to live off the land for a while had to make do with the nuts, fungi, berries, and other things that grew there, taking care, in the restricted zone, to only pick ones that weren’t poisonous.
As our guardians were all either related to, or close friends with, Taz and Vostia, we entered the park as part of their retinue and spent a lovely day there. A day made all the better for finally having Jip with us. She’d only arrived the day before, and with Ezrias and Maranta’s boys still away, they’d offered to house her as well as me. Brak, Grak, and their grandparents did show up to join in the fun, however, and Kirsty thought the twins were even handsomer in person.
Within limits, we were allowed to explore the park, those limits clearly defined by brightly coloured boundary posts.
Zovia gave Simon a stern look when she saw him eyeing them.
“Forbidden means forbidden, Simon. No one goes into Chorathase’s restricted zone without an official guide.”
“And there are areas into which even they do not go,” said Verim, “so if you are seized with an urge to go out of bounds, restrain it. One Beom’s Day search through barbed bushes, ferocious ferns, menacing moss, and other perfidious plants is enough for any man.”
He turned to bestow a stern look on Taz, who protested.
“That was not intentional, Verim. I was only six. I got lost.”
“With a little help,” Tolith muttered.
His wife smiled. “There was no proof of that, Tol. Just suspicion on your part. Supreme Ruler Obruk absolved Drazok of all blame. And while, having been convicted of treason, Drazok did not take the Oath of Loyalty at Taz’s coronation, he did take it at Obruk’s, and the Ring of Beom would have told Obruk if Drazok had meant harm to his heir.”
A foreknowledge of treachery was one of the powers the enchanted ring was supposed to bequeath to a Supreme Ruler, and no one who ever swore an Oath of Loyalty on it ever fared well if they later betrayed Cholar’s sovereign in some way. But this type of reasoning failed to move Tolith from his position.
“Taz was not the heir at the time. He was still some months away from taking the Verification of the Succession and therefore not even on the list of possibilities. Had he been, Obruk might have got a sense of some desire to get rid of a potential heir with the type of spirited nature Drazok knew he’d never be able to control. As it was, Obruk accepted Drazok’s claim that he’d looked away for a moment and His Little Highness, being such an adventurous and fast-moving child, got away from him.”
“Why were you even with Drazok, Taz?” Mardis wanted to know. “It was usually Royal Guardsmen who kept an eye on us when we were set free to roam.”
As I noticed a couple of them were doing with Challa, as well as Princess Dalara’s young daughter and the children and grandchildren of various sub-rulers, doubtless knowing from experience that Challa, for one, would be off like a shot if she thought no one was watching.
“We were looking for you,” Taz replied. “Drazok said you’d found a curious looking nest just past the boundary posts and wanted to show it to me.”
“Which you would have believed, because Mardis quite often went out of bounds in order to examine such objects,” Tolith retorted.
“Yes, I must admit I was surprised it wasn’t him we were looking for,” said Verim.
“I still have great anxiety whenever he is out here,” said Zovia.
Mardis looked affronted. “How did this get turned onto me? I’ll admit I do get carried away sometimes, but I always take a guide with me when I go into the restricted zone. A practice I began as soon as Taz’s experience alerted me to the necessity.”
“Oh?” said Verim. “I thought it had more to do with your father’s vow to give you a sound thrashing if you didn’t start to exercise more caution and set your little cousin a better example.”
It was hard to imagine the mild-mannered Prince Mardis ever doing anything that might have led to any kind of thrashing, whereas the more wilful and reckless Prince Taziol had received and, by his own admission, merited, quite a few.
“Um, well, I do vaguely recall him making some reference to that, yes,” Mardis confessed. “But as I grew older, seeking accompaniment became habit.”
“I still marvel at your luck every time you go in there,” said Verim.
“How far in did you go?” I asked Taz.
“A long way. When I couldn’t find Mardis I turned to go back to the royal camp site and realized Drazok was no longer behind me. I couldn’t locate any of the boundary posts either, and at that point panicked and ran, getting deeper and deeper into the restricted zone until, eventually, I had to drop to the ground, exhausted. I did, however, still have enough strength to start crying inconsolably. Something I intended to keep up for some time.”
“Who found you?”
“I did,” said Tolith. “But not in the restricted zone. He walked back out to the search party’s base camp near the boundary all on his own. I was the only one there, having been assigned to the monitoring of communications.”
Taz nodded. “It was the strangest thing. As I lay sobbing, I suddenly got the feeling all was going to be well and instantly became calm. A few minutes later, a soft wind came up and began to blow through some of the foliage around me, as if showing me a path. I followed it and just before nightfall came upon the base camp.”
“Great was the rejoicing throughout Cholar that night,” said Vostia. “Like Mardis and the other children, I’d been taken home, but Taz later told me he even got a hug from Verim, instead of the spanking he was expecting.”
“I did consider it,” Verim said, but with a smile that belied this.
There was no answering smile from Tolith. “It was as we were all celebrating the wanderer’s safe return I caught sight of Drazok’s face. He did not seem at all pleased. I will never believe he was not, even then, working against our current Supreme Ruler.”
“But did Taz not tell everyone it was Drazok who took him into the restricted area?” Jip inquired.
Taz answered. “No. Like most children, I was a bit afraid of him, and the look he gave me…well, I thought it better to go along with his assertion I’d just got lost.”
“How do you explain getting un-lost?” asked Simon, the person for whose benefit I’m sure this story was being told.
“I can’t really. Though I’ve often wondered if I was somewhere near the Shield of Beom when I stopped running. It is supposed to lie hidden in the wilds of Chorathase.”
“The Shield of Beom is but a legend,” Verim said gruffly.
“Most legends have some basis in fact,” Ezrias countered.
“I am aware of that, but if it ever existed, it was lost hundreds of years ago. No one even knows what it looked like. Accounts from Beom’s time were vague in their description.”
Interesting though the tale of the lost little prince and Tolith’s early suspicions of Drazok had been, I was far more taken with the Shield of Beom and wanted to know more about it. So did Simon and Arlyne, and we spent a good part of the next day in Ezrias’s library. As anticipated, we found several books with references to it, and after dividing them up, relayed snippets of information to each other as we came across them.
To sum up, however, Beom’s shield, was like his ring, credited with helping him unify Cholar and become Supreme Ruler. Initially, however, he was just the oldest son of one of several monarchs who ruled over various sections of the planet. Beom’s father ruled the largest of them, making him and his family targets for neighbouring warlords who wanted to expand their territory in a big way. The guy next door, a burly individual named Jexl, was particularly aggressive and one day managed to corner and capture Beom, who was still a teenager at the time. The kid escaped and took refuge in Chorathase, which was probably even more rugged back then than it is now. But his survival skills were, of necessity, pretty good, and he stayed there through the autumn, winter, and even second winter rather than risk recapture by Jexl’s troops, who knew where he’d gone and were always patrolling the area.
Around mid-spring, they gave up. Beom emerged from Chorathase unscathed and caused quite a stir when he returned home, as everyone had assumed he’d perished — either from the elements, or at the hands of Jexl, who’d recently been dispatched by Beom’s father. But Jexl had been a ruthless despot, so even his own people didn’t mind too much.
When asked how he, a mere boy, had survived so long in Chorathase, Beom said he’d found a magical shield that protected him from both the elements and his enemies. People naturally wanted to get a look at such a splendid object, but Beom refused to produce it, saying he’d left it in the wilds of Chorathase, where it would stay until he or one of his family had reason to call upon its powers again.
There was no record of him personally doing so, but subsequent royal accounts suggested some of his descendants might have made use of it during the first couple of centuries of the House of Beom’s rule. None of them ever revealed its location and were as closed-mouthed about what it looked like as he’d been, so we found no artist’s rendering of a coat of arms, or even anything about its size, shape, or what it was made of. Just the statement, repeated in several books, that it ‘could be relied upon to safeguard Beom and all of his blood both in his time and in the ages to come’.
Which wasn’t very helpful, but at least we had another bit of lore to add to our growing knowledge of Cholarian history.