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原文 Edit

<font face=1><DIV align="center">The Kings Men<br>
<p>
Part one - The Players
<p>
By Cartland the Barbarian
<p>
<DIV align="left"> <IMG src="Book/fancy_font/e_78x61.dds" width=51 height=61>lviria Borodino had fallen in love with Martes Venere the first time she had seen him.  She was the daughter of a poor dressmaker and would never, under normal circumstances, have had this opportunity.  But one day her mother was suffering from a cold.  There was a delivery to be made to the palace.  Elviria was sent to do it.
<p>
Martes, the King's second son, was not who she had come to see, but by chance he was walking down the main palace artery while she was walking up.  She was instantly smitten.  
<p>
It would be hard to say why this should be.  Martes could not possibly have been called handsome.  He was young but that was all that could be said for him as an object of adoration.  He was prematurely bald and his fondness for good living was apparent in his physique.  Indeed, as he was a short man there was some discussion as to whether his girth might actually exceed his height.
<p>
At the time she first saw him Elviria had no idea who he was, nor did she recognise the name when she was told it.  The royal family were never talked of in town.  It was illegal to insult them.  Better to forget their existence.  It hardly impinged on normal day to day life.  The family name, Venere, she recognised at once but apart from the King himself and the crown prince she had no knowledge of the names of the royal family.  She did not even know how many children there were.  They kept themselves out of the public eye.
<p>
She was soon to discover that this was a misleading expression as what was considered 'public' varied according to status.  Martes was very well known among the higher echelons of society. The royal family had total control over the media and discouraged the establishment of any rival operations by publicly hanging anyone even rumoured to be involved.
<p>
Dressmakers would never of course mix socially with families as grand as the Veneres but they often worked for them.  Sometimes her mother's clients would prattle on happily, all but treating the dressmaker as an equal while a fitting was in progress.  Such women, who often seemed to Elviria to have been born without a brain, seldom guarded their words.  Others would ignore anyone who was not their social equal but would converse with friends quite openly as if servants and employees were not real people and so were not actually there.  Elviria, increasingly involved as her mother's assistant, kept silent and listened.  Slowly she began to learn all about Martes.
<p>
The first piece of information to reach her had initially surprised her.  Martes was a ladies' man.  Yet, when she considered it, it made sense.  She herself had seen beyond his outward appearance and recognised something deeper - or she thought she had.  Why would she be unique?
<p>
What she learned next was less palatable.  Martes had, naturally, attended the state's most prestigious university.  This had nothing to do with his academic achievements, which were modest, and everything to do with his father being the King.  The youth was ill suited to academia.  And of course the whole thing was only for show.  At the end of the three years he would do as all wealthy students did at such establishments, buy a degree.  It was therefore quite unnecessary for him to have to do any work in the intervening period.  He did dabble a little in art so as to have something to display at his matriculation.  But even here there were rumours, naturally hotly denied, that his professor had more than a hand in the final compositions.  With nothing else to do, Martes set up a club for those male students in the same situation.  The sole purpose of the club was to gratify carnal desires.  In deference to his lineage, the club was called The King's Men.
<p>
This behaviour in a student was not so far from the norm as to excite any talk.  Boys, after all, would be boys.  But the club did not finish with Martes university career.  The declared intention of all members of the club was to avoid matrimony, while having a thoroughly good time with members of the opposite sex.  They adopted the motto 'a full life with no strings'.  An epithet more widely used among the club members themselves was 'the hump'em, dump 'em club.'
<p>
At the university Martes had done everything he could to demonstrate his utter contempt for authority.  The establishment was a venerable one dating back to the days when marauding gangs of looters were an ever present threat.  Its defenses now served to keep the students within the compound and out of the city.  Rules forbad forays into the urban area except at specific times or in particular circumstances.  Martes used the wall as his perch.  He would hold court, with his legs dangling over whichever side suited his whim.  And when he was bored with this he would as often as not make a deliberate display of jumping down on the city side.
<p>
His cavalier attitude was not popular with the ladies.  It was not that they adopted a moral standpoint on the question of wedlock.  They were really no more interested in monogamy, a seeming synonym for monotony, than the men were.  They did however believe that the privilege of dumping partners should be within their purview.  Belief or not, when most of the eligible youth and all eligible money was tied into the club membership, most women overcame their scruples to ensnare a feathered nest for the future.  They were rarely successful.  When it comes to avoiding commitment, men are in a league of their own.
<p>
Elviria had been raised in a poor ghetto within the city.  In her childhood, often unsupervised by her overworked mother, she had forged friendships with other children from the neighbourhood who found themselves similarly abandoned.  She had two particular friends; Tanisa Sucrosus, a fellow imperial girl, and an orphaned Redguard boy known only by the nickname 'Minty'.  She trusted them absolutely and told them all about her feelings for Martes.  When her own sources of information left her floundering, one or other of them could be relied upon to fill in the gaps.  Tanisa helped out in a store in the town and Minty was apprenticed to a healer.  Both these jobs took them into the middle class areas of the town where they were exposed to a great deal of scurrilous gossip that was carried out in defiance of the law.  (Only the poor lacked the resources to bribe the officials to forget anything overheard.)
<p>
What the three friends did not see was that their relationships had subtly changed as they grew older.  Minty, unknown even to himself, had fallen in love with Elviria.  The boy's parents had died in one of the city's not infrequent epidemics of plague.  He was four at the time.  He had attached himself to a neighbouring family where there were already a great many children.  Constantly worrying over her latest pregnancy the mother seemed completely oblivious to the presence of strangers at her table. Minty was not the only one to take advantage of this.  She fed whoever turned up with a nourishing if uninviting gruel.
<p>
He lived rough but a code of honour, instilled from the cradle, meant that he would always pay for anything he acquired illegally.  If he stole sausages to keep his foster parents with food he would steal something the butcher needed in recompense.  This would go on until he could find or make what was needed to settle the debt.  His exploits did not go unnoticed but he was a polite and charming child whose recycling activities were certainly more help than harm in the city.  Everyone turned a blind eye.  As a healer he was a novice.  He was also a fast learner.  Perhaps aware that he had been 'allowed' to carry out his youthful activities unchecked, he would now help out wherever he could in the ghetto without charge.  His patron, a well-heeled man whose wealth had come from specialising in diseases of the rich, would have been appalled had he known.
<p>
Everyone in the ghetto liked Minty, Elviria and Tanisa as much as the rest.  The three were always found together when they had free time.
<p>
Minty willingly ferreted out nuggets of information to pass on to his friend.  He found it upsetting to tell her, but put this down to a fear of her getting hurt.  However one looked at it, to a youth with a strong code of personal honour, Martes and his crew were an unpleasant bunch.  And yet he had to excuse them.  Minty was a normal boy.  He had not been immune to the physiological and psychological pressures of puberty.  He was no na?e innocent.  At least his experiments had been with partners who wanted the same thing in the full knowledge of what they were doing and why.  It was a normal part of growing up.  What Martes and the King's Men seemed to want to do, was to prolong boyhood into their middle years.  Whilst this might be odd, Minty felt he had to excuse them because they were not actually doing anything he had not done himself.  Minty was not a boy who coped easily with the idea of 'degree'.  
<p>
The third member of their threesome, Tanisa, had no qualms at all about passing on what she learned.  She just considered it a natural part of 'girl's talk'.  In fact there was a deeper reason at work here too.  As Minty subconsciously yearned for Elviria, Tanisa in her turn longed for the Redguard boy.  In exactly the same way, having known him for so long, she did not recognise the feeling for what it was.  She did not see that Minty was in love already but she could tell she was second in his priorities even as a friend.  Tanisa was a simple soul, too kind and gentle to be jealous.  Subconsciously she knew that if Elviria was married and out of the picture, she would have Minty to herself.  So she passed on what she could learn, in particular that, although the women who moved in Royal circles thoroughly disliked Martes behaviour, they were unable to resist his charms.
<p>
In the palace, the King railed against the dissolute behaviour of his second son.  Martes revelled in his ability to ignore his father.  As he was not the heir apparent who could care if he attracted scandal the way a rotting carcase attracted flies, at least he was noticed!  The King had discovered only one way in which he could exercise any control at all over the boy.  Martes, despite his size and shape, was a passionate equestrian.  As befitted an absolute monarch the King maintained a very large stable with the most exotic equine breeds available to the state.  When Martes became particularly objectionable he would acquire a new one.  It was guaranteed to calm his son's excess, at least for a time.
<p>
Yet beneath all this self-confidence and swagger Martes had a growing worry that his life had no purpose.  He would never have articulated it in those terms.  As far as he was concerned something was missing.
<p>
To an outsider the real cause would have been easy to see.  His father lavished all his time and attention on the heir - probably to make sure he continued to be happy to be 'in waiting'.  Martes' mother was a brood mare, too busy expanding the royal bloodline to worry about any of her children.  Podgy, arrogant and disagreeable, the boy had alienated any who had been his nurse or teacher.
<p>
That he had received no love in his life did not mean he had none to give.  Indeed his one saving grace was that he did show a limited amount of affection to his younger siblings.  They, like he, were there only to provide security against disaster and were treated with as little interest.  He saw himself, the oldest, as their mentor.  It was a role he was certainly not qualified to play, and one an average family would keep him well away from, but he was better than nothing in the royal house.  It was also evidence that, although he had no way of understanding or more importantly accessing these finer emotions, he was not without them.  The adolescent male's confusion over love and physical release, which had never left him, made him sure that love was the one thing NOT missing from his life and that the root of his dissatisfaction had to lie elsewhere.
<p>
Sadly, he was no more capable of taking control of his own future than the three in the poor ghetto.  He became more and more overbearing, irritable and outrageous, trying to swamp his inchoate unhappiness in excess.
<p>
And in this way all four parties continued as before until fate played a hand.  And fate very often deals itself some very odd cards.
<p>

訳文 Edit

<font face=1><DIV align="center">The Kings Men<br>
<p>
Part one - The Players
<p>
By Cartland the Barbarian
<p>
<DIV align="left"> <IMG src="Book/fancy_font/e_78x61.dds" width=51 height=61>lviria Borodino had fallen in love with Martes Venere the first time she had seen him.  She was the daughter of a poor dressmaker and would never, under normal circumstances, have had this opportunity.  But one day her mother was suffering from a cold.  There was a delivery to be made to the palace.  Elviria was sent to do it.
<p>
Martes, the King's second son, was not who she had come to see, but by chance he was walking down the main palace artery while she was walking up.  She was instantly smitten.  
<p>
It would be hard to say why this should be.  Martes could not possibly have been called handsome.  He was young but that was all that could be said for him as an object of adoration.  He was prematurely bald and his fondness for good living was apparent in his physique.  Indeed, as he was a short man there was some discussion as to whether his girth might actually exceed his height.
<p>
At the time she first saw him Elviria had no idea who he was, nor did she recognise the name when she was told it.  The royal family were never talked of in town.  It was illegal to insult them.  Better to forget their existence.  It hardly impinged on normal day to day life.  The family name, Venere, she recognised at once but apart from the King himself and the crown prince she had no knowledge of the names of the royal family.  She did not even know how many children there were.  They kept themselves out of the public eye.
<p>
She was soon to discover that this was a misleading expression as what was considered 'public' varied according to status.  Martes was very well known among the higher echelons of society. The royal family had total control over the media and discouraged the establishment of any rival operations by publicly hanging anyone even rumoured to be involved.
<p>
Dressmakers would never of course mix socially with families as grand as the Veneres but they often worked for them.  Sometimes her mother's clients would prattle on happily, all but treating the dressmaker as an equal while a fitting was in progress.  Such women, who often seemed to Elviria to have been born without a brain, seldom guarded their words.  Others would ignore anyone who was not their social equal but would converse with friends quite openly as if servants and employees were not real people and so were not actually there.  Elviria, increasingly involved as her mother's assistant, kept silent and listened.  Slowly she began to learn all about Martes.
<p>
The first piece of information to reach her had initially surprised her.  Martes was a ladies' man.  Yet, when she considered it, it made sense.  She herself had seen beyond his outward appearance and recognised something deeper - or she thought she had.  Why would she be unique?
<p>
What she learned next was less palatable.  Martes had, naturally, attended the state's most prestigious university.  This had nothing to do with his academic achievements, which were modest, and everything to do with his father being the King.  The youth was ill suited to academia.  And of course the whole thing was only for show.  At the end of the three years he would do as all wealthy students did at such establishments, buy a degree.  It was therefore quite unnecessary for him to have to do any work in the intervening period.  He did dabble a little in art so as to have something to display at his matriculation.  But even here there were rumours, naturally hotly denied, that his professor had more than a hand in the final compositions.  With nothing else to do, Martes set up a club for those male students in the same situation.  The sole purpose of the club was to gratify carnal desires.  In deference to his lineage, the club was called The King's Men.
<p>
This behaviour in a student was not so far from the norm as to excite any talk.  Boys, after all, would be boys.  But the club did not finish with Martes university career.  The declared intention of all members of the club was to avoid matrimony, while having a thoroughly good time with members of the opposite sex.  They adopted the motto 'a full life with no strings'.  An epithet more widely used among the club members themselves was 'the hump'em, dump 'em club.'
<p>
At the university Martes had done everything he could to demonstrate his utter contempt for authority.  The establishment was a venerable one dating back to the days when marauding gangs of looters were an ever present threat.  Its defenses now served to keep the students within the compound and out of the city.  Rules forbad forays into the urban area except at specific times or in particular circumstances.  Martes used the wall as his perch.  He would hold court, with his legs dangling over whichever side suited his whim.  And when he was bored with this he would as often as not make a deliberate display of jumping down on the city side.
<p>
His cavalier attitude was not popular with the ladies.  It was not that they adopted a moral standpoint on the question of wedlock.  They were really no more interested in monogamy, a seeming synonym for monotony, than the men were.  They did however believe that the privilege of dumping partners should be within their purview.  Belief or not, when most of the eligible youth and all eligible money was tied into the club membership, most women overcame their scruples to ensnare a feathered nest for the future.  They were rarely successful.  When it comes to avoiding commitment, men are in a league of their own.
<p>
Elviria had been raised in a poor ghetto within the city.  In her childhood, often unsupervised by her overworked mother, she had forged friendships with other children from the neighbourhood who found themselves similarly abandoned.  She had two particular friends; Tanisa Sucrosus, a fellow imperial girl, and an orphaned Redguard boy known only by the nickname 'Minty'.  She trusted them absolutely and told them all about her feelings for Martes.  When her own sources of information left her floundering, one or other of them could be relied upon to fill in the gaps.  Tanisa helped out in a store in the town and Minty was apprenticed to a healer.  Both these jobs took them into the middle class areas of the town where they were exposed to a great deal of scurrilous gossip that was carried out in defiance of the law.  (Only the poor lacked the resources to bribe the officials to forget anything overheard.)
<p>
What the three friends did not see was that their relationships had subtly changed as they grew older.  Minty, unknown even to himself, had fallen in love with Elviria.  The boy's parents had died in one of the city's not infrequent epidemics of plague.  He was four at the time.  He had attached himself to a neighbouring family where there were already a great many children.  Constantly worrying over her latest pregnancy the mother seemed completely oblivious to the presence of strangers at her table. Minty was not the only one to take advantage of this.  She fed whoever turned up with a nourishing if uninviting gruel.
<p>
He lived rough but a code of honour, instilled from the cradle, meant that he would always pay for anything he acquired illegally.  If he stole sausages to keep his foster parents with food he would steal something the butcher needed in recompense.  This would go on until he could find or make what was needed to settle the debt.  His exploits did not go unnoticed but he was a polite and charming child whose recycling activities were certainly more help than harm in the city.  Everyone turned a blind eye.  As a healer he was a novice.  He was also a fast learner.  Perhaps aware that he had been 'allowed' to carry out his youthful activities unchecked, he would now help out wherever he could in the ghetto without charge.  His patron, a well-heeled man whose wealth had come from specialising in diseases of the rich, would have been appalled had he known.
<p>
Everyone in the ghetto liked Minty, Elviria and Tanisa as much as the rest.  The three were always found together when they had free time.
<p>
Minty willingly ferreted out nuggets of information to pass on to his friend.  He found it upsetting to tell her, but put this down to a fear of her getting hurt.  However one looked at it, to a youth with a strong code of personal honour, Martes and his crew were an unpleasant bunch.  And yet he had to excuse them.  Minty was a normal boy.  He had not been immune to the physiological and psychological pressures of puberty.  He was no na?e innocent.  At least his experiments had been with partners who wanted the same thing in the full knowledge of what they were doing and why.  It was a normal part of growing up.  What Martes and the King's Men seemed to want to do, was to prolong boyhood into their middle years.  Whilst this might be odd, Minty felt he had to excuse them because they were not actually doing anything he had not done himself.  Minty was not a boy who coped easily with the idea of 'degree'.  
<p>
The third member of their threesome, Tanisa, had no qualms at all about passing on what she learned.  She just considered it a natural part of 'girl's talk'.  In fact there was a deeper reason at work here too.  As Minty subconsciously yearned for Elviria, Tanisa in her turn longed for the Redguard boy.  In exactly the same way, having known him for so long, she did not recognise the feeling for what it was.  She did not see that Minty was in love already but she could tell she was second in his priorities even as a friend.  Tanisa was a simple soul, too kind and gentle to be jealous.  Subconsciously she knew that if Elviria was married and out of the picture, she would have Minty to herself.  So she passed on what she could learn, in particular that, although the women who moved in Royal circles thoroughly disliked Martes behaviour, they were unable to resist his charms.
<p>
In the palace, the King railed against the dissolute behaviour of his second son.  Martes revelled in his ability to ignore his father.  As he was not the heir apparent who could care if he attracted scandal the way a rotting carcase attracted flies, at least he was noticed!  The King had discovered only one way in which he could exercise any control at all over the boy.  Martes, despite his size and shape, was a passionate equestrian.  As befitted an absolute monarch the King maintained a very large stable with the most exotic equine breeds available to the state.  When Martes became particularly objectionable he would acquire a new one.  It was guaranteed to calm his son's excess, at least for a time.
<p>
Yet beneath all this self-confidence and swagger Martes had a growing worry that his life had no purpose.  He would never have articulated it in those terms.  As far as he was concerned something was missing.
<p>
To an outsider the real cause would have been easy to see.  His father lavished all his time and attention on the heir - probably to make sure he continued to be happy to be 'in waiting'.  Martes' mother was a brood mare, too busy expanding the royal bloodline to worry about any of her children.  Podgy, arrogant and disagreeable, the boy had alienated any who had been his nurse or teacher.
<p>
That he had received no love in his life did not mean he had none to give.  Indeed his one saving grace was that he did show a limited amount of affection to his younger siblings.  They, like he, were there only to provide security against disaster and were treated with as little interest.  He saw himself, the oldest, as their mentor.  It was a role he was certainly not qualified to play, and one an average family would keep him well away from, but he was better than nothing in the royal house.  It was also evidence that, although he had no way of understanding or more importantly accessing these finer emotions, he was not without them.  The adolescent male's confusion over love and physical release, which had never left him, made him sure that love was the one thing NOT missing from his life and that the root of his dissatisfaction had to lie elsewhere.
<p>
Sadly, he was no more capable of taking control of his own future than the three in the poor ghetto.  He became more and more overbearing, irritable and outrageous, trying to swamp his inchoate unhappiness in excess.
<p>
And in this way all four parties continued as before until fate played a hand.  And fate very often deals itself some very odd cards.
<p>


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Last-modified: 2011-03-16 (水) 22:58:33