Turnip

Loveable. Insatiable. Survivor.

“I am not a historian. But I know some history.

“If you think to read an account here of the final years of the late king’s reign, or the brief ones of three of his sons, then, yes, I admit a coincidence in the chronology, but no, you are in the wrong place.

“I am there, so to speak, but not yet on the page.

“I can give you the merest scrapings of what took place, and always from what is perhaps a singular point of view: I start our story harvesting turnips. If there is still a castle library in the benighted days in which you read then try the librarian for a rather less personal history.

“I am 18 at the outbreak of war and 20 at the dawning of the new era. More years on the king’s council than I care to remember, since, though at the time a minute there would have seemed more than preposterous. Unimaginable.

“You would not recognise me. The boy and the man have grown far apart. There is no possible line from there to here other than the specific and very narrow one I walked.

“I write at the age of fifty. This is the story of my time with the Princes. Qatan and Qalin. Chahin and Cheruh. I am worse than the kitchen boy, filthier than the coal scuttle, on the first day of the tale I will tell you.”