The Not Bright Knight...

Everyone said he wasn’t very smart.

Well not everyone, his mother always said that it wasn’t that he wasn’t smart, it was that he saw the world differently. But honestly, that was probably just a mother’s way of saying he wasn’t very smart.

But he knew things. He learned a lot by watching. Like the summer he spent with the blacksmith learning how to work iron. He learned that the reason he could put a piece of meat on his sword and cook over an open campfire without melting it was because the fire in an open area could not get as hot as a fire within the stone pit of the shop. That even though it could get hot enough to melt stone, that would not happen before the metal melted. Wood, metal, then stone.

But what he could not learn was how to work the metal enough to make it sharp and straight, and also beautiful. He would cure it too soon and the sword would shatter the first time it took a blow. Or he would get it too hot, and it would be impossible to shape. So, he was sent on his way with instructions to find something else to do that wouldn't take as much thinking.

He tried his hand at farming but could never remember what to plant when. Or what the different cycles of the moon meant. Or how much water each plant needed. If it were up to him to feed a village from his crops, they would all starve. But he did learn that a field full of dried out crops burned easily and quickly and as long as there was no other vegetation around the fire didn’t spread. The farmer he was apprenticed to suggested that unless he always wanted to just be a field hand for someone else he should find something else to do that would require less thinking.

Shop keeping didn’t work. Too many numbers. Too many different things to keep track of. Baking did not work. You had to do math to bake, that didn’t even last a day. The baker took one look at the loaf of bread he had prepared and declared it not even worth putting in the oven. He was quickly running out of jobs to try.

More doing, less thinking. That was always the advice. If he was set on a path with exact instructions, and not too many of them, he was pretty good at doing.

So, he became a knight. He was a good knight. Which always made him laugh when he said it. “I’m a good knight. Get it?” And his mother would always laugh even though everyone else, especially the other knights, would just roll their eyes.

But he took to being a knight. He liked having quests and important tasks. He liked his armor and his new sword. The blacksmith had been so relieved that he wanted to buy a sword instead of trying to make one again that he made him a custom weighted and designed weapon. He even liked days in court where all he had to do was stand and listen to the king hold court. The other knights found those days to be very boring and the problems the peasants brought to be mundane and beneath them.

One of the things about being told you are not smart your entire life is that you don’t assume everyone else is beneath you. He knew that the poorest peasant could try to teach him something new. He knew that their lives were complicated and difficult and full of thinking about how to make things work. He didn’t mind standing still and listening to their problems. He often didn’t understand them or understand why the king decided to solve them in the ways that he did, but he still liked listening.

And sometimes they would bring a problem that only a knight could solve. A good knight like him.

He was listening one day to a story about a princess in a tower. She had been enchanted to sleep for a thousand years. The tower was protected by a dragon and a thick maze of rose bushes with long, sharp thorns. Nobody could cut their way through the thicket to get to her; that was if they could get past the dragon at all.

But the kingdom the princess belonged to had long since faded away. And now that land was just sitting there. Prime farmland filled with a thicket of thorns, though the roses were said to be beautiful, they didn’t really make the king any money did they? And it was said that the princess in the tower was lovely beyond compare. Maybe it was time for the king to take a new wife? That way the kingdoms would be legitimately merged for those who were sticklers for such things.

The knight listened to the story and was surprised when the king asked if he had any ideas on how to get past the dragon. He ignored the quiet laughs from his fellow knights and asked if anyone had tried sneaking past it while it was asleep? That’s how Knight Carlise snuck out to see his fair maiden, by waiting until the knight master was asleep. Not that the knight master was a dragon, but he thought the same principle would work.

He ignored the furious rumblings behind him from both Knight Carlise and the knight master and said that’s what he would try anyway.

And so that’s how he was set on the quest to sneak past the sleeping dragon and rescue the princess in the tower.