The Blondel of legend was the minstrel who found Richard the Lionhearted when he was imprisoned, and helped to effect his escape. I became aware of him through Gore Vidal’s novel A Search for the King.

My Blondel is a different character, wandering through a different medieval land. I like him, and I think you will too, but don’t expect him to save the world. His ambitions and magics are small, and he is more likely to hang out with peasants and innkeepers than with knights. Come to think of it, that is also true of Tidac and Cinnabar, who came later. Ah well, what do you expect when the son of an Oklahoma farmer sits down at the typewriter.

Blondel of Arden

Blondel was a man of many talents, not the least of which was survival. He could sing a ballad, juggle knives in a sideshow or books in a clerk’s office. He had been a traveling bard at times, but only when no other opportunity presented itself. Bards were, and still are in some rough places, considered of inferior stock. Though they regale, their status remains insecure and the songs they sing must fit into an acceptable mold.

Now Blondel was a man in love with the sound of his own voice, but to play the bard was to play the fool and he had no stomach for it. He had his pride, and he exercised it whenever circumstances permitted.

So Blondel, who was odd in many other ways as well, would pass up easy and lucrative employment at a Lord‘s house one night, only to spend half the next singing himself hoarse in a peasant‘s hut for a meal and a tick ridden tic to sleep on. He had done so only a week past, in fact, which accounted for a certain gruffness of speech and a cough that was just now passing.

Blondel had done many things in his time, but of them all, soldiering appealed to him least. He had a positive aversion to the feel of a blade piercing flesh; an aversion that was exceeded only by the unhappy possibility that the flesh might be his own. He carried a sword, which he had used on occasion, but he preferred flight to confrontation and tried to restrict its use to cutting wood for his night fires.

Blondel was a far ranging man. He never did say where he was born, but when asked his full title he invariably replied, “Blondel of Arden“. This phrase verged on usurpation, but it was merely and literally true. From Channel to Northpeak, Blondel had wandered the face of his native land for as long as anyone could remember. Oldsters remembered Blondel from their youths and said that he looked no different than he had then. This patent absurdity lent a certain mystical cast to Blondel‘s basically simple life, and he did nothing to discourage it. In point of fact, it was Blondel‘s father who had walked these paths thirty years earlier; they shared name, appearance, and an inclination to wander. In the north country, where they had both been these last two decades, everyone knew his secret; but here in the south they saw Blondel, remembered his father, and awe followed him like a shy, stray dog. more tomorrow