Your Life as Every Rank of Medieval Kingdom

[00:00:00]Level one, the serf.

[00:00:02]You were born in mud.

[00:00:04]You do not remember being born, but you remember the mud.

[00:00:08]It is the first thing you knew.

[00:00:10]Your village has no name that matters.

[00:00:12]It sits on land owned by a lord you have never seen.

[00:00:16]You are 8 years old when you start working.

[00:00:19]You wake before the sun, because the sun does not wait.

[00:00:22]Neither does the lord.

[00:00:24]You share one room with your whole family. Your mother, your father, your younger sister, and you.

[00:00:31]There is a fire in the center.

[00:00:33]There is smoke, and there is cold, and there is little else.

[00:00:37]You sleep on straw.

[00:00:39]The straw has fleas.

[00:00:41]Everyone has fleas.

[00:00:43]You do not know there is another way to live.

[00:00:45]You work the lord's fields 3 days a week for nothing.

[00:00:49]You work your family's strip of land on the other days.

[00:00:52]Nothing is truly yours.

[00:00:54]The land belongs to the lord.

[00:00:56]The harvest is taxed by the lord.

[00:00:59]The mill where you grind your grain belongs to the lord.

[00:01:02]The oven where you bake your bread belongs to the lord.

[00:01:06]You pay him to use all of it.

[00:01:08]You cannot leave the village without his permission.

[00:01:11]You cannot marry without his permission.

[00:01:14]You were born here, and you will die here.

[00:01:17]That is the law. And the law is the lord.

[00:01:21]Your father bends lower every year.

[00:01:23]His back is curved like a question that has no answer.

[00:01:27]Your mother's hands are cracked and bleeding from the winter.

[00:01:31]Your sister is six, and already she carries water.

[00:01:34]You learn the seasons like a prayer.

[00:01:37]Plant in spring.

[00:01:39]Pray for rain.

[00:01:41]Harvest in autumn. Survive the winter.

[00:01:44]Some winters you do not all survive.

[00:01:47]When you are 10, the fever comes through the village.

[00:01:51]It takes the miller's son.

[00:01:52]It takes two babies.

[00:01:54]It reaches your house one cold night.

[00:01:57]Your father coughs and coughs, and then one morning he does not wake.

[00:02:03]You bury him at the edge of the field he worked.

[00:02:05]There is no stone. There is no priest who stays long.

[00:02:09]There is only the cold ground and your mother's silence.

[00:02:13]You are the man of the house now.

[00:02:15]You are 10 years old.

[00:02:17]You take your father's place in the lord's fields.

[00:02:21]The reeve watches you work and writes nothing kind in his book.

[00:02:25]You keep your head down.

[00:02:27]The head kept down is the head that keeps its place.

[00:02:30]You dream sometimes of the world beyond the village.

[00:02:34]You have heard there are towns.

[00:02:36]You have heard of walls and markets and men who are free.

[00:02:40]You do not believe it is for you.

[00:02:43]But you hold the thought anyway, deep inside, where no one can take it.

[00:02:48]Level two, the freeman.

[00:02:51]They say town air makes a man free.

[00:02:53]You hear it from a tinker passing through.

[00:02:56]Live in a chartered town a year and a day and the lord cannot reclaim you.

[00:03:00]The town's law replaces the lord's law.

[00:03:03]You are 17 when you decide. You do not tell your mother until the night before.

[00:03:08]She does not weep. She presses a crust of bread into your hand.

[00:03:12]She tells you to send for them when you can.

[00:03:14]Your sister, now 13, holds your sleeve and won't let go.

[00:03:19]You promise to return.

[00:03:21]You leave before dawn so the reeve will not see.

[00:03:24]You walk for three days. Your feet bleed inside shoes made of rag and hope.

[00:03:29]You reach the town with its wall and its gate.

[00:03:32]The gate alone is taller than anything you have ever seen.

[00:03:35]Inside, the noise nearly knocks you down.

[00:03:38]Hundreds of voices, carts, hammers, shouting, bells, so many people and none of them know your name.

[00:03:46]You find work where you can. You haul water. You carry stone. You shovel filth from the gutters for coin.

[00:03:53]You sleep in a stable, grateful for the warmth of the animals.

[00:03:57]A year and a day, you count every one.

[00:04:00]You keep your head down again, but for a different reason now.

[00:04:04]Then a wheelwright takes you on.

[00:04:06]He is a hard man with soft eyes. He needs hands and you have two.

[00:04:11]He teaches you the trade, wood and iron and the patience to bend them.

[00:04:15]You learn that a wheel is a circle of trust. One weak spoke and the whole thing fails.

[00:04:21]You are good with your hands, your father's hands, you think.

[00:04:24]The year and the day pass.

[00:04:26]No lord comes for you. You are free.

[00:04:30]You stand in the market square and you say the word out loud, free.

[00:04:34]It tastes strange.

[00:04:36]You become a journeyman. You earn real wages.

[00:04:39]You rent a corner of a room above the workshop.

[00:04:42]It is the first space that is almost your own.

[00:04:45]At night, you lie awake listening to the town breathe.

[00:04:48]Watchmen call the hours. Drunks sing in the lanes.

[00:04:52]The boy on flea-bitten straw could not have imagined a roof that did not leak.

[00:04:57]You send coins home wrapped in cloth with a trader you trust.

[00:05:01]You learn the town has its own ranks, apprentices at the bottom, journeymen above them, masters above them.

[00:05:08]The guild controls it all.

[00:05:10]Freedom is not the same as power.

[00:05:12]You are free to be poor.

[00:05:14]You are free to work until your hands seize, but you are also free to dream, and you dream of more.

[00:05:21]>> Level three, the man-at-arms.

[00:05:24]War does not ask permission.

[00:05:26]It arrives like weather.

[00:05:28]You are 21 when the lord of the region calls for men.

[00:05:31]The king has a quarrel with a neighbor.

[00:05:34]The quarrels of kings are paid in common blood. The town must send soldiers or send coin.

[00:05:40]You have little coin.

[00:05:41]You have a strong back and a steady hand. A recruiter offers wages and a chance.

[00:05:47]You take it.

[00:05:48]You tell yourself it is only for a season.

[00:05:51]You are given a spear and a rusted helmet. They give you a coat stuffed with rags and call it armor.

[00:05:57]Your training is a week, mostly shouting.

[00:06:00]You learn to stand in a line and not run. That is the whole of it. Hold the line.

[00:06:06]The man beside you holds it, too.

[00:06:09]If one runs, the line breaks. If the line breaks, you all die.

[00:06:14]You march for weeks.

[00:06:16]Your feet remember the road, but this one is longer.

[00:06:19]You eat what you can carry and then you eat less.

[00:06:23]You see your first dead man in a ditch.

[00:06:25]He wears the same rags you wear.

[00:06:28]You do not look long.

[00:06:30]Your first battle is chaos and noise and mud.

[00:06:33]Always the mud. You were born in it and you may die in it. Men scream in languages you half understand. The line holds.

[00:06:42]You stab and you push and you do not think.

[00:06:46]When it ends, you are alive and you do not know why.

[00:06:50]The man who stood beside you is not.

[00:06:53]You learn the soldier's lesson fast.

[00:06:55]Luck is the only general who never loses.

[00:06:58]In the camp between battles, you make a friend. He is a baker's son from a town three valleys over.

[00:07:05]He talks of the bread he will bake when he goes home.

[00:07:08]He dies in the spring, face down in a river crossing.

[00:07:11]You do not learn his town's name in time to send word.

[00:07:15]You carry the not knowing like a stone in your boot.

[00:07:18]You fight in three more battles that year.

[00:07:21]You stop counting the dead. You grow hard in a way that frightens you in your reflection.

[00:07:27]But you are good at staying alive and staying alive is a skill.

[00:07:31]A sergeant notices.

[00:07:33]He sees you drag a wounded man from the press when others ran.

[00:07:37]He sees you keep your head when the line wavered. He puts you at the front where the trusted men stand. You are no longer just a body in the line. You are a soldier with a name they remember.

[00:07:49]Level four, the squire.

[00:07:52]A knight does not usually come from the mud. Birth decides most things in this world, but war bends rules that peace keeps rigid. In your fourth battle, a knight is unhorsed in front of you. The enemy closes like wolves. You do not think. You step over him and you fight.

[00:08:10]You hold the space around him until help comes. You should have died. You did not.

[00:08:15]The knight remembers.

[00:08:17]His own squire fell in that battle, gutted by a pike. He needs a new one, and war has made him less particular about blood. He takes you on. You are 24.

[00:08:28]You become a squire to a knight.

[00:08:31]You care for his horses. You polish his armor until you see your tired face in it. You learn to ride properly, not the plotting of a farm beast, but the wheeling charge of a warhorse. You learn the lance. You learn the sword in earnest now, not the desperate stabbing of the line. You learn the longer game of the blade. You train until your arms shake, and then you train more.

[00:08:55]The knight sends you into your first tournament to test your seat. You are unhorsed twice and bruised everywhere a man can bruise. The third pass, you hold. The crowd murmurs. A common-born squire is not supposed to ride like that. You ride like that anyway.

[00:09:12]The knight is hard, but he is fair. He teaches you the code they call chivalry.

[00:09:18]Protect the weak. Keep your word. Honor your lord.

[00:09:22]You notice that the knights do not always follow it. You keep that observation in the deep place with the others.

[00:09:29]You learn how nobles speak, the words they use, the way they hold their hands, the things they never say aloud. You learn that power has a language.

[00:09:39]You are learning it like a second tongue.

[00:09:42]You eat at the lower end of the great hall now. The food is warm. There is meat.

[00:09:47]You think of your sister and your mother.

[00:09:49]You think of the bark-thin winters and save what you can.

[00:09:53]You send word home that you are alive and rising.

[00:09:57]You serve the knight for 4 years. You ride with him into two campaigns. You see castles taken and villages burned.

[00:10:04]Some, like the one you were born in.

[00:10:06]You do not let yourself think who lived there.

[00:10:09]At the end of a long, bloody day, the king walks the field. He honors the brave.

[00:10:15]The knight speaks your name.

[00:10:17]The king's sword touches your shoulder.

[00:10:20]You kneel a squire.

[00:10:22]You rise a knight.

[00:10:25]Level five, the knight.

[00:10:27]The sword on your shoulder does not make you rich. It makes you responsible.

[00:10:32]You are 28 and you are a knight with almost nothing.

[00:10:36]A knight needs a horse, armor, weapons, and a servant to carry it all.

[00:10:41]These cost more than a serf sees in 10 lifetimes.

[00:10:45]The king grants you a small holding for your service. A manor barely worth the name. A few villages, a mill, some woods, and the people who come with them.

[00:10:56]Serfs.

[00:10:57]You are now the lord of serfs.

[00:11:00]You stand in the muddy yard of your own manor. Something turns your stomach.

[00:11:05]You are the lord now.

[00:11:06]The reeve who writes in the book is yours now.

[00:11:10]The three-day fields are worked for you now.

[00:11:13]The boy keeping his head down out there is you, 20 years ago.

[00:11:17]You promise yourself you will be different.

[00:11:20]You find that being different costs money you do not have.

[00:11:24]To rise further, a knight needs allies.

[00:11:27]He needs blood tied to better blood.

[00:11:29]A neighboring lord has a daughter and not enough sons.

[00:11:33]He needs a fighting man who owes him loyalty.

[00:11:36]You need land and a name with weight.

[00:11:39]The match is arranged the way such things are.

[00:11:42]You meet your wife 3 days before the wedding.

[00:11:45]She is quiet and clever and her eyes miss nothing.

[00:11:49]You expect a cold bargain.

[00:11:51]You find, slowly, something warmer.

[00:11:54]She manages the manor while you ride to war. She is better at it than you are.

[00:11:59]She keeps the accounts. She handles the steward, the bailiff, the disputes.

[00:12:04]She bears a son within 2 years, a daughter the year after.

[00:12:08]The son will be your heir.

[00:12:10]You hold him.

[00:12:12]You think of your father in the cold ground with no stone.

[00:12:15]You swear this boy will have a stone the size of a wall.

[00:12:19]You fight in the king's wars to earn more land. You distinguish yourself again and again.

[00:12:25]The only thing you ever truly owned is your willingness not to die.

[00:12:30]You take prisoners worth ransoms.

[00:12:32]At a siege that lasts a winter, you lead the men through a breach.

[00:12:36]Half of them do not come back out.

[00:12:39]The lord whose walls you broke surrenders his sword to you.

[00:12:43]He is worth a fortune in ransom and the fortune is yours.

[00:12:47]You feel the strange weight of holding a man's life for coin.

[00:12:52]You take his ransom and three more before the year is done.

[00:12:56]Ransoms are how a poor knight becomes a rich one.

[00:12:59]You grow your holding. You buy horses, armor, men who follow your banner.

[00:13:05]You begin to be a man others must reckon with.

[00:13:09]Level six, the baron.

[00:13:11]Land begets land if you survive long enough.

[00:13:15]You are 35 and you hold more than one manor now.

[00:13:18]You hold many.

[00:13:20]The king raises you to baron for your loyalty and your usefulness in his wars.

[00:13:24]You are no longer a knight with a holding. You are a lord with knights of your own.

[00:13:29]Men kneel to you now and swear the oaths you once swore to others.

[00:13:33]You owe the king military service. You must bring armed men whenever he calls.

[00:13:38]In exchange, you rule your lands like a small king.

[00:13:42]You hold court in your hall. You judge disputes between your tenants.

[00:13:46]A stolen pig, a broken fence, a man who struck another over a debt.

[00:13:52]You sit in the place of the man who decides.

[00:13:55]You remember the reeve's cruel book from your childhood. You try to be just.

[00:14:00]You are just more often than not.

[00:14:02]But you learn that mercy and survival do not always travel the same road.

[00:14:07]You build a proper castle or strengthen the one you have. Stone walls, a keep, a gate taller than the town gate that once amazed you.

[00:14:16]Your wife runs the household and lands while you serve at court.

[00:14:20]Your son is growing.

[00:14:22]You hire tutors for him.

[00:14:23]He learns to read, which you never properly did.

[00:14:27]You hide that from him.

[00:14:28]You learn to read late and badly in secret, your wife your teacher.

[00:14:33]You are too proud to let your own boy know his father started in the mud.

[00:14:38]Your mother dies in her sleep in a warm room you gave her.

[00:14:41]She dies far from the leaking roof of your birth.

[00:14:45]Your sister married a freeman years ago and lives well enough.

[00:14:49]You kept the promise the frightened boy made before dawn.

[00:14:52]You attend the king's court now.

[00:14:55]You wear fine cloth. You speak the noble tongue you once studied like a spy.

[00:15:00]Almost no one knows where you came from.

[00:15:03]The few who do, you reward for their silence.

[00:15:06]You play the games of court. A rival baron spreads a rumor.

[00:15:10]Your blood is common, he says, and your title is theft.

[00:15:14]The rumor is true, which is what makes it dangerous.

[00:15:18]You do not deny it loudly. You smile and you ruin quietly through debts and whispers of your own.

[00:15:26]Within a year, he has lost the king's favor and half his lands.

[00:15:30]You take none of his lands, so no one sees your hand.

[00:15:33]That is the lesson of court. The cleanest blade is the one no one watches you draw.

[00:15:40]Who is rising? Who is falling?

[00:15:43]Whose ear the king favors now?

[00:15:46]You are good at it. You have been reading rooms since you were old enough to fear them. You make allies. You make a few enemies.

[00:15:54]You learn that the higher you climb, the longer the fall.

[00:15:57]And the more men there are who would gladly push you.

[00:16:01]Level seven, the earl. The king needs men he can trust with whole regions. You are 42 and you have proven you can hold land and win wars. He makes you an earl.

[00:16:12]It is one of the greatest titles in the realm. You govern an entire region in the king's name. Lesser barons now owe their loyalty to you. You command hundreds of knights. Thousands of men-at-arms answer your banner.

[00:16:25]You collect the king's taxes across your lands. You take your share before it ever reaches him.

[00:16:30]You hold the king's justice in your region. Your courts decide who lives and who hangs.

[00:16:36]One winter, the harvest fails across your region. The granaries are low and the people are hungry. You know hunger from the inside.

[00:16:44]Your stewards say, "Hold the grain and sell it high come spring."

[00:16:48]You open the granaries instead and feed the villages at a loss. The king's men ask why a hard man went soft. You tell them a starving region pays no taxes and breeds no soldiers.

[00:17:00]It is true, but not the whole truth, and you keep the rest. You build roads and bridges or you let them rot as it suits you. You found a town and granted a charter. The same kind of charter that once made you free. You think about that as you seal it. Some serf will hear that town air makes a man free.

[00:17:19]He will walk three days on bleeding feet. Your charter will be the thing that saves him.

[00:17:24]You let that thought sit. You do not act on it. Power teaches you to leave the door open a crack. No more.

[00:17:31]Your son is a young man now. He is everything you were not at his age.

[00:17:36]Confident, educated, born to it. He has never been hungry.

[00:17:41]He has never buried a father in a field.

[00:17:44]You look at him and feel pride and a strange distance.

[00:17:47]He does not know the cold. You spent your whole life building a wall between him and the cold.

[00:17:53]Now the wall stands between you and him.

[00:17:56]Your daughter is married to the son of a powerful lord. A match that strengthens your house.

[00:18:01]You barely know her husband. You sealed her future with a signature.

[00:18:06]Your own future was once sealed the same way. By stronger hands.

[00:18:10]You tell yourself it is the way of things. You almost believe it. At court, you are now one of the men everyone watches. The king consults you. The king also fears you a little.

[00:18:21]Kings fear any man who has grown too large. You make yourself necessary without making yourself a threat.

[00:18:28]It is the hardest balance you have ever held.

[00:18:31]Harder than the line.

[00:18:32]Harder than the lance.

[00:18:34]You do not always get it right.

[00:18:37]Level eight. The Duke.

[00:18:40]There is one rank below the crown and you reach it.

[00:18:43]You are 50 years old. The king makes you a duke, the highest noble in the land.

[00:18:49]Only the royal family stands above you now.

[00:18:52]You are kin to the king now. Your house bound to his by marriage.

[00:18:57]Your grandchildren carry royal blood.

[00:19:00]The boy born in the mud is the grandfather of princes.

[00:19:04]You hold lands that rival the king's own.

[00:19:07]You command armies.

[00:19:09]You sit at the center of power in the small room where decisions are made.

[00:19:13]You advise the king on war and peace.

[00:19:16]You advise him which lords to trust and which to break.

[00:19:20]You have broken a few.

[00:19:22]Men who reached too far, too fast.

[00:19:25]You did not enjoy it.

[00:19:27]You did it anyway.

[00:19:29]The king grows old. His health fails.

[00:19:32]The court splits into factions, each behind a possible heir.

[00:19:37]The king's eldest son is weak. His younger son is cruel and clever.

[00:19:42]A cousin lurks at the edges with an army and a claim.

[00:19:46]Everyone is choosing a side.

[00:19:48]Everyone watches to see your choice because your weight could decide it.

[00:19:53]You are the kingmaker now.

[00:19:56]You hold the realm's future in your aging hands.

[00:20:00]You think of all the lines you ever held.

[00:20:03]The line in the mud as a boy.

[00:20:05]The line of soldiers with their spears.

[00:20:08]The thin line a knight walks between honor and survival.

[00:20:13]This is just another line.

[00:20:15]The largest you have ever held.

[00:20:17]If it breaks, the kingdom bleeds.

[00:20:21]Your wife counsels you in the quiet hours.

[00:20:23]She has stood beside you for more than 20 years.

[00:20:26]She has been the sharpest mind in every room you ever entered.

[00:20:31]She is older now and slower.

[00:20:33]You love her in a way you never had words for.

[00:20:37]She tells you to be careful.

[00:20:38]She tells you that the men closest to the throne die closest to the throne.

[00:20:44]You know she is right.

[00:20:46]You have buried enough men to know.

[00:20:48]You make your choice.

[00:20:50]You back the heir most likely to win and to remember who crowned him.

[00:20:55]You commit your armies. You commit your name.

[00:20:58]You commit everything you spent 50 years building.

[00:21:03]The old king dies in his bed.

[00:21:06]The realm holds its breath.

[00:21:08]And the war for the crown begins.

[00:21:12]Level nine, the king.

[00:21:14]The crown does not always pass to the one who was born for it. Sometimes it passes to the one still standing when the fighting stops.

[00:21:22]The heir you backed wins the war. Then he dies of a fever or a poison no one will name. He leaves no son.

[00:21:31]The realm is leaderless and bleeding and afraid. The other claimants are dead or fled or broken.

[00:21:38]You are 56 years old. You command the largest army in the kingdom. Your blood runs in the royal children through your own.

[00:21:46]You are the only man left who can hold the realm together.

[00:21:50]The lords come to you. Some out of loyalty, some out of fear. Some because there is no one else. They offer you the crown.

[00:21:58]You think about refusing. You think about it for one long night. Then you remember the mud, your father's fever, the line you always held.

[00:22:08]You take the crown. You are the king.

[00:22:11]The boy born on straw with fleas now sits on a throne.

[00:22:14]You are anointed in a great cathedral.

[00:22:17]They pour holy oil on the head that once stayed bowed to survive.

[00:22:21]Bishops call you chosen by God. You know better. You were chosen by survival, by luck, by a refusal to stop climbing.

[00:22:30]But you let them say it. The story matters more than the truth. You learned that long ago.

[00:22:36]Now you rule.

[00:22:37]You hold your first great court as king.

[00:22:40]The hall is full of bent backs. Every head in the room is kept down, the way you once kept yours down in a field.

[00:22:48]You understand for the first time what the lord saw when he looked at the bent backs.

[00:22:52]He saw safety. He saw a thousand people who would not meet his eyes.

[00:22:57]You hated him for it, and now you sit where he sat. And you discover that the throne is the loneliest place you have ever stood.

[00:23:05]Every man who kneels wants something.

[00:23:07]Every smile hides a calculation.

[00:23:10]The lords who raised you up are already wondering, could they raise up someone else?

[00:23:15]You reward your friends, and you watch them.

[00:23:18]You must feed the people in lean years or they will rise.

[00:23:22]You remember what hunger does to a man who has nothing left to lose. You remember it from the inside. You tax the realm to pay for its defense. You hear that somewhere a serf curses the king's taxes as you once cursed your lords.

[00:23:36]You sit with that. You do not change it.

[00:23:39]The crown teaches you what every rank taught you.

[00:23:42]The top is held up by the men below, and the men below are always tired.

[00:23:47]Your wife becomes your queen.

[00:23:49]She rules beside you, wiser than any counselor, but her health is failing now.

[00:23:54]The cold halls have worn her thin. So has the weight of a hundred worries.

[00:24:00]You hold her hand in the great chamber.

[00:24:02]You are afraid, truly afraid, for the first time since the mud.

[00:24:08]Level 10, the old king.

[00:24:11]You are 68 years old now. You have worn the crown for 12 years.

[00:24:15]It has grown heavy in a way that has nothing to do with gold.

[00:24:19]Your wife, your queen, the quiet clever girl you met three days before your wedding, died four winters ago.

[00:24:26]You buried her beneath a stone the size of a wall.

[00:24:30]It is the kind you once swore your father would have.

[00:24:33]You sit alone in the great hall most nights.

[00:24:36]The fire burns. The smoke rises as it rose in the one room of your birth.

[00:24:41]For a moment, you are 8 years old again, sleeping on straw.

[00:24:45]Your son is grown and gray himself, waiting for a crown he is not sure he wants.

[00:24:51]Your grandchildren are princes and princesses who have never known a hungry day.

[00:24:56]They love you in their careful way.

[00:24:58]They will never understand you. How could they?

[00:25:01]You spent your life making certain they never would.

[00:25:05]Your body is failing.

[00:25:06]The old wounds ache.

[00:25:08]The spear that grazed your side at 21, the fall from a warhorse that never set right, the cold that has lived in your bones since the village winters.

[00:25:18]You are tired.

[00:25:20]You have been tired since you were 10 years old, since the morning your father did not wake.

[00:25:25]You rule still, but lightly now, letting your son take more each year.

[00:25:31]You have done terrible things.

[00:25:33]You have ordered men to die.

[00:25:35]You have burned villages like the one that made you.

[00:25:38]You signed away your daughter's life with a stroke of ink.

[00:25:42]You climbed over better men and called it duty.

[00:25:45]Some nights you believe it was.

[00:25:47]Some nights you do not.

[00:25:49]You wonder if the boy in the mud would recognize the king in the hall.

[00:25:53]You think he would be afraid of him.

[00:25:55]You think he would be right to be.

[00:25:57]No one is left who knew you when you were nothing.

[00:26:00]They are gone, into the ground, into the chronicles that call you great.

[00:26:05]The truth went into the ground with them.

[00:26:08]Only the story remains.

[00:26:10]The story will outlive you.

[00:26:12]They will say you were chosen by God.

[00:26:15]They will not say you were born in mud.

[00:26:18]When you die, they will bury you in a cathedral. They will carve your face in stone.

[00:26:23]They will write that you were a great king, and in a way you were.

[00:26:28]And in a way, it is all a lie.

[00:26:30]And both of those things are true.

[00:26:33]Somewhere tonight, in a village with no name that matters, a child is being born on a bed of straw.

[00:26:40]He is born on land owned by a lord he will never see.

[00:26:44]He cries in the cold and smoke.

[00:26:46]His mother holds him close.

[00:26:49]His father bends his curved back over a fire that barely warms them.

[00:26:53]The child is a serf.

[00:26:55]He belongs to the land before he can speak.

[00:26:58]His life is decided before he draws his first breath, the way yours was.

[00:27:04]He will keep his head down.

[00:27:06]He will work the fields. He will dream deep where no one can reach of a world beyond the village.

[00:27:14]He has no idea what he is.

[00:27:16]He has no idea what he could become.

[00:27:20]He will learn.

[00:27:21]They always do.

[00:27:23]The cycle continues.