Misplaced Trust

“You can’t do this,” he said.

“Can’t I? I am the one with the horse, the one with the sword.”

“And that gives you the right?”

“Damn right.”

The man scowled up at the horseman. His dirty clothes, torn and patched here and there, hung loosely about his thin frame. Muscles lay there, beneath the dirt and yarn, but none so great as the horseman’s. “Blades aren’t everything,” he said.

“Aren’t they?” The horseman stared at him through the narrow eye slits of his helm. As far as he was concerned he had the power here and that meant he could do what he wanted. If not for God’s morality he would not have spared a second thought for this man, not for any of them, and they would have all been laying dead at his feet. That, and only that, was what was keeping these people alive. He would go to Heaven when he died; he did not need to take innocent blood with him, not when it could be avoided.

“No. What about us? There are more than twenty of us and only one of you. How many of us could you kill before we stopped you?”

The horseman laughed. “I am a knight! You, you think you could stand up to me?”

Smiling, the man crossed his arms. “Why not?”

“Because,” said the knight, growing angry now, “I am the power here. Do you know what would happen if I left? What would happen to you?”

“Why don’t you tell us,” said a woman from the crowd standing behind the man.

The knight looked up at her. Young, she was pretty thing, in a homely way. He smiled. “Wolves, wolves will come. And brigands. And—”

“We have them already! How would it be any different?” This from a man on the other side of the crowd from the woman. The people began to shout, began to echo their questions, began to jeer. They were becoming angry, more heedless of his horse and sword.

“They will come in greater numbers!” the knight shouted. “Far more than ever before! They will come and steal your chickens, your cattle; your money. And your children. They will come for your children. They will come for them all and leave you with nothing but grief and tears and, finally, death.”

“And you would do the same,” said the man beside his horse. His arms still crossed the man, who oddly enough was not the town’s priest nor mayor nor anyone of any real importance at all but was rather just a simple, middle aged farmer, stood there and would not back down.

“You, sir knight, bring more grief and tears to us in doing this than brigands and wolves ever have. For they we know, we know what they want and what they are capable of. But you, in you we placed our trust and our hopes. In doing this you betray that; taking our money, our crops, our hard made goods. And for what? For what, I ask you! So that mansions might be built? So that those who already have everything might have even more? Tell us, good sir, what it is these taxes you have been collecting this past year are actually going towards. Tell us that the merchants and investors in the cities are not building newer, larger mansions—yet again!— to replace the ones they built just a few years ago that were already larger than the King’s palace. Tell us, sir knight, that we are not being thrown out of our homes so they who already possess more than God may possess still more! Tell us!”

The knight stared at the farmer, at the man. A simple man, one who had been working all his life to feed his family, to give them all he could in life…

They waited for him, waited for him to reply to the farmer’s questions. His accusations. Finally, after some time and hardly any thought at all the knight, his fist loosening around the hilt of his sword and his shoulders and eyes falling, said, “I…I cannot.”