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it was because he was speaking of my father to the cause of his abdication, or because he was addressing a puppy and a six-year-old as if they had intelligence, I am not sure. He glanced about, reassessing the situation. “Wait here,” he told us finally. “I’ll slip in and bring something out for you. Less chance of me getting stepped on . . . or caught. Now stay.” And he reinforced his command with a firm gesture of his hand. I backed up to a wall and crouched down there, out of traffic’s way, and Nosy sat obediently beside me. I watched admiringly as Cob approached the door and slipped between the clustered folk, eeling smoothly into the kitchens.
    With Cob out of sight, the more general populace claimed my attention. Largely the folk that passed us were serving people and cooks, with a scattering of minstrels and merchants and

delivery folk. I watched them come and go with a weary curiosity. I had already seen too much that day to find them of great interest. Almost more than food I desired a quiet place away from all this activity. I sat flat on the ground, my back against the sun-warmed wall of the keep, and put my forehead on my knees. Nosy leaned against me.
    Nosy’s stick tail beating against the earth roused me. I lifted my face from my knees to perceive a tall pair of brown boots before me. My eyes traveled up rough leather pants and over a coarse wool shirt to a shaggy bearded face thatched with pepper-gray hair. The man staring down at me balanced a small keg on one shoulder.
    “You the bastid, hey?”
    I had heard the word often enough to know it meant me, without grasping the fullness of its meaning. I nodded slowly. The man’s face brightened with interest.
    “Hey,” he said loudly, no longer speaking to me but to the folk coming and going. “Here’s the bastid. Stiff-as-a-stick Chivalry’s by-blow. Looks a fair bit like him, don’t you say? Who’s your mother, boy?”
    To their credit, most of the passing people continued to come and go, with no more than a curious stare at the six-year-old sitting by the wall. But the cask man’s question was evidently of great interest, for more than a few heads turned, and several tradesmen who had just exited from the kitchen drew nearer to hear the answer.
    But I did not have an answer. Mother had been Mother, and whatever I had known of her was already fading. So I made

no reply, but only stared up at him.
    “Hey. What’s your name then, boy?” And turning to his audience, he confided, “I heard he ain’t got no name. No high-flown royal name to shape him, nor even a cottage name to scold him by. That right, boy? You got a name?”
    The group of onlookers was growing. A few showed pity in their eyes, but none interfered. Some of what I was feeling passed to Nosy, who dropped over onto his side and showed his belly in supplication while thumping his tail in that ancient canine signal that always means, “I’m only a puppy. I cannot defend myself. Have mercy.” Had they been dogs, they would have sniffed me over and then drawn back. But humans have no such inbred courtesies. So when I didn’t answer, the man drew a step nearer and repeated, “You got a name, boy?”
    I stood slowly, and the wall that had been warm against my back a moment ago was now a chill barrier to retreat. At my feet, Nosy squirmed in the dust on his back and let out a pleading whine. “No,” I said softly, and when the man made as if to lean closer to hear my words, “NO!” I shouted, and
repelled
at him, while crabbing sideways along the wall. I saw him stagger a step backward, losing his grip on his cask, so that it fell to the cobbled path and cracked open. No one in the crowd could have understood what had happened. I certainly didn’t. For the most part, folk laughed to see a grown man cower back from a child. In that moment my reputation for both temper and spirit was made, for before nightfall the tale of the bastard standing up to his tormentor was all