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SUMMARY: Another side of the Aurthur Legends

When Cleon was a small boy of barely five years a horde of barbarians attacked his village. They came thundering among the mud huts of the town in the early hours of the morning, the sun barely a whisper on the horizon. All of the men of the village stormed out to meet the barbarians, but they were vastly outnumbered, and were mostly slaughtered.
Cleon peered through the doorway watching the battle. He watched in horror as his Father was decapitated in full view of his child's eyes. The event was the founding of the rest of his life, everything he did contained a small glimmer of that moment, reflected in a thousand ways.
The only reason he didn't get to add the sight of his mother being killed, and probably raped in the bargain, was the timely arrival of an enormous group of King Arthur's Knight's. They came roaring over a hill and chased the marauding monsters out of the village, leaving little beyond smoldering ashes where the houses stood and wailing where the laughter of families once dwelled. Cleon never saw a war movie where the Calvary arrived, but if he had, the resemblance to his memory of that day would probably put a smile on his face.
In his memory the knights were soon departed as well, onward to some new adventure, looking for more people in distress. Even at the time this story truly begins, at age fourteen, Cleon could remember the way he felt that day when he was five. He remembered seeing the sun shining off of their silver helmets as the Knights rode off on their gigantic war horses, off to do battle with the mighty creatures of the forest, the dragons, the one-eyed ogres chronicled in Homer.
Cleon made an oath to himself that day. A child's oath that grew into a man's, or as much of a man any fourteen year old boy could hope to be. He swore that he would work to protect the innocent against those that would do them harm. In order to facilitate this goal he would become a Knight.
Today was the day of the trials, the ritualized tests that would establish which of the numerous candidates for squire would pass muster. Cleon had been training for the trials for four years in the knight's academy, learning to fight with a sword and with his mind. The training was run by old retired knights, one of whom, Cleon's favorite, was among the men who had saved his Mother that fateful day.
Although his formal training had begun four years earlier, in actuality it began the day the barbarians attacked his village. A naturally intelligent boy, Cleon was a sponge, soaking up every bit of information and knowledge that he could about knights, their history, their unique culture, their preferred methods of combat.
And it didn't stop there. Once he learned that the Knights were most fond of fighting with heavy broadswords, Cleon found himself an enormous stick that he would struggle over his head endless times each day, conditioning himself. His Mother would watch him staggering around the hut with the huge stick tottering at the edge of the boy's strength and laugh to herself, not knowing his internal reason for hefting the thing about.