Tales of the Zodiac - The Goat's Tale by PJ Hetherhouse Read Free Book Online Page A

walls? Only a sheep needs a pen.”
    “Take a seat,” she commands. Vesta’s tone is no friendlier outside of the king’s presence. As is custom, I select the chair facing away from the door. It screeches over the white stone as I pull it away from the table. It is desperately uncomfortable; a chair designed to look like a chair rather than to serve as one. Vesta glides past and into her own seat. There is an efficient grace to her movement. Her eyes meet mine, possibly for the first time since our introduction. It is only now that I notice an almost androgynous quality to her face.
    “Welcome to my chambers. This is my reception room. I have been told it is somewhat barren, but for this I do not apologise.” The tone of her voice, flat and emotionless, makes this lack of apology quite clear.
    I shrug. I cannot say that my or my father’s room would be much different were we to inhabit a palace and, even if it would, it is not my place to judge. I am simply relieved that it is not a gaol cell. To my further relief, she skips any further conversational courtesies.
    “Have you ever heard of Brightstone?” she asks. Her voice is unusually precise, possessing no trace of any local accent. Meanwhile, the question itself concerns me deeply.
    “Yes,” I reply.
    “What do you know of it?” she asks. There is not a hint of curiosity in her voice.
    If a person is going to be sent to a place, the bare minimum that they might hope for is that it actually exists. Unfortunately, this is not the case for Brightstone. It is somewhere beyond the snow, the stuff of folklore, the kind of place that one might hear about from the friend of an uncle whose wife’s grandfather’s cousin had been there and survived. It is somewhere that people merely hope might exist, some other vestige of humanity clinging on to this otherwise dead, frozen mass.
    “I know nothing of it. Only what I have heard.”
    “And what have you heard?”
    “Well… To begin with, most people say that it doesn’t exist.”
    “And what do you think?”
    “I think that you probably know one way or another.”
    “Very good. What if I were to tell you that it does exist?”
    “I’d probably be more likely to believe you than anyone else I know.” It is only as I say these words that I realise they are true. Even though I have only just met her, I realise that this grey, slender woman with all the charisma of cold stone has made quite an impression on me. She is clearly a superior being.
    “Then you are a good judge of character. It does indeed exist.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I have been there. Some time ago.”
    “I see.” A boy given to enthusiasm would have perhaps reacted differently.
    “It is the only other civilisation on The Mother Island. That is not to say we share much in common. Brightstone is more advanced; they have technologies and wealth beyond what people here can imagine. It is also much older – perhaps a thousand years old. As it is more northerly and less exposed to the Eastern Sea, it is also possesses a more pleasant climate.”
    “It sounds like you should have stayed there,” I reply.
    “Things are not always so simple, Gruffydd.” She takes a map from a drawer in the table and lays it out before me.
    Although I have seen maps less brown and faded, I have never seen one so accurate before. The only accurate maps that I have ever seen depict the known world. This map, meanwhile, makes the world appear much bigger than I had previously understood. Maps of the Mother Island simply don’t exist any more and, although I was aware of its existence, I had never had an inkling of its shape, size or extent. There was probably one time when a drawing of an old man’s faint memory of how the Mother Island used to look would not have been too far from reality. But when the drawing of that faint memory has been copied and copied for hundreds of years without verification, it becomes useless. So useless in fact that the practice of