Castle The Series - 0004 Hwijje & Travisher

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CASTLE THE SERIES - 00000100

HWIJJE AND TRAVISHER

NOTE. For those familiar with Castle from elsewhere, this is a new backstory that takes place forty-eight Castle years before the incursion of 568 after the Fell year by which time Travisher has long since dien and Will is the sixty-two year old Master huntsman and about to retire.

For information on spelling I refer you to Castle The Series - The Title Page. You are not looking at typos or mistakes it's supposed to be like that!
Unagreeän, single, unmarried, one without a marital agreement.
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11th of Haldol 520 After the Fell Year. Just before mid-summer.

Travisher the Master huntsman was a bow hunter, nearly seven feet tall, skeletally thin and emaciated looking with a whipcord strength about him. He had the weather beaten look of a man who spent a lot of his time in the open. He was fifty-seven and could still out run most of his staff of hunters and trackers, with possibly the exception of twelve year old Will who was his deputy Master huntsman. Will was in fact unrelated to Travisher, but their uncanny resemblance was such that many were perplexed that Travisher, a decent and honourable man, had not acknowledged Will, whose unagreeän mother had refused to be drawn as to Will’s father, as his son. There were few who could even pull the over a hundred weights draw of the massive seven and a half foot limbs of Travisher’s longbows let alone hit aught with them. He was an irascible, laconic man with a dry puckish sense of humour.

The hunters and their trackers had been celebrating the successful delivery of four mammoth to the Keep, which would feed the Folk for some time. Well into their cups, Travisher was challenged by his cousine Tioday, who was one of his trackers, to run the upcoming thirty thousand stride race gainst the best runners of the Folk. The stake was a bottle of Bowman the brew Master’s vintage brandy. Tioday, who was twenty-two, knew of her cousin’s fondth for brandy and of his competitive nature, but was unaware of just how far and how fast he could still run.

However, Travisher knew he was a certain winner, for there was only Web the messenger who would even attempt to keep up with him, and he knew she was only good for two-thirds of the distance, for though she had the stamina for the entire distance she didn’t have enough to run it at his pace. He knew Will would consider it bad manners to compete with his mentor, but in any event Travisher doubted that Will had yet acquired the resistance to pain such a run would need.

Travisher hadn’t competed for years because he considered it unfair and that it would discourage the upcoming generation whom the Folk would need to be at their peak when they matured. Since he had to go through with it, once sober, he decided that there was little point in going into training for the event since when hunting he regularly ran that far and farther, and ran it at speed. However, if he was going to bother it would have to be worth his while, and though taking a bottle off his young cousine would put a smile on his face it wasn’t enough, so he also decided to try to raise as much in sponsorship tokens as possible. Everyone donated tokens to those in hardship, as did he, but this was to be a statement of discontent.

Many of the Folk gossiped about Travisher, mostly because Hwijje his attractive and buxom wife was young enough to be his granddaughter, so he decided to give them something worth gossiping about. Felicia his first wife had faded young from a wasting illth. He’d loved her and had mourned her the customary two years, but even then he’d not considered another woman.

After his customary mourning period, Hwijje had spent fourteen lunes chasing her quarry to no avail. In the end she’d moved into his bed and telt him he could either do his best to put a babe under her heart or sleep on the floor. A difficult man, but one of honour, Travisher had never for a second thought of revealing the circumstances of his unusual second courtship to any. All knew he loved Hwijje who was now pregnant with the third child of his second family, and the children of his first family had a great deal of respect for their step mother who was younger than all but two of them.

Travisher was currently in dispute with the Council on behalf of all the crafters in his office concerning their Collective contributions, and it was an acrimonious dispute. Travisher, who as the Master huntsman was on the Council, had explained to his family he was going to collect the tokens for the most contentious purpose he could think of. He’d added he’d excluded the Council from consideration, for whilst it clearly topped the list by a long way in terms of the resultant consternation that would result if he donated the tokens there, it had already misappropriated and extorted more than its fair share of his crafters’ tokens and efforts via the Collective, and in his lexicon Collective contribution was now a synonym for thieft.

It was no surprise to his children when their irascible father told them that the fund Luuk, the disreputable landlord of the White Swan, a small and rather seedy inn at Outgangside, maintained to ensure the never quite sober, the senile and the witless could still have a drink seemed perfect.

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Comments

familiar with Castle from elsewhere ?

You refer to “familiar with Castle from elsewhere.” I can’t find any references to it on Google. Can you provide more info?

I have enjoyed reading your daily postings. The are highly varied and each provides a distinct viewpoint. I seldom post comments, but I am surprised there have been so few comments on your stories.

It will be interesting to see how you handle a longer complex series. This is different from the needs of independent short stories. I have the impression you have written a lot of material, possibly published by another name. Please continue to post here.

Familiar with Castle from elsewhere

I used to have my own website, but it generated few reads. When I recieved some unpleasant stuff from folk who had read some of my material that had only been posted on BCTS, I know not if they were just casual readers or elsewise, I eventually removed everything off the site and cancelled the payments. I did that because I couldn't police the site, but hoped BCTS would be able to stop that sort of thing. I had a small number of readers, some of who had been reading my work for a long time. Since I had recieved more reads on BCTS in a few weeks than my web site had achieved in all the years I had it I posted that I would be posting on BCTS and removing my material from my own site. I know most of my old readership now read me on BCTS, I suspect as guests. I've never published elsewhere, though I email stuff to a number of readers. As I have explained in a PM concerning it Castle is different from every thing else I have ever written. It is a complete world, with a history, a culture and everything else that a society has. The world is inhabited by the Folk who mostly originated from England at the time of Edward I and the Islamic worlds of the Middle East and Islamic Iberia, with a sprinkling from Berber and sub Saharan African cultures. Their initial language was mostly Middle English which developed differently from Modern English into Folk - the language of the Folk. If you read the Castle title page you will see that the work is not entirely written in English, but has a flavour of Folk. I'm trying to sort out in my head how to post what and in what order. The work is as much one concerning linguistic development as a social commentary and an LGBT+ platform. I currently have the remaining five chapters of Marcy fully prepared for posting and a further one concerning a funeral too. Marcy is easy to read as all but the last paragraph in Ch. 6 is before her incursion to Castle and thus written in modern English. If after that I can't sell it I'll take it off the shelf. But comments are welcome. I don't like abuse but honest opinion and criticism is fine, after all there's a lot of stuff on BCTS I don't like. I'll post a tale of the beginings that may provide some assistance.
Regards,
Eolwaen

Eolwaen