The twisted life of Julian the Dragonboy didn't turn out the way his mother, Birgitta, would have wished. Even his wordless father, Holger, could never have contemplated the cruel, final encounter with someone from the future. Not a good end to a young man's life. And who could have predicted the nightmare that was Julian's path to adulthood?
Barely a year after Fra Johannes stepped out of the monastery and recognised the marriage of Birgitta and Holger, they were blessed on Christmas Day in 1223 with a son. Born with big, round, unblinking eyes, a pale, delicate face, with a thin smile on his lips as if pleased to have arrived, Julian was admired by everyone. Held tightly in the cradle of his mother's arms, he stared out at the world, satisfied that his home was to be the delightful little Austrian town of Durnstein.
And why shouldn't he? Durnstein, they said, was God's own town - a patchwork of vineyards sloping down from the Castle to the River Danube, overlooked benignly by the monastery and the jovial Fra Johannes. Three years, no more, had passed when Julian was running up and down between those rows of vines, helping to produce the family's grape harvest. He had an amazing capacity to learn quickly. Not only trailing after his mother and father, picking bunches of ripe fruit and dropping them carefully into the basket on his back, but also, quite soon, acquiring the know-how to prune the vines within an inch of their lives, ensuring an abundance for the following year.
Life should have been perfect.
I have just started this. With a child pulling at me I found it hard to get to page 1. Would you consider putting one link to all the pages? Looking forward to the rest of the story.
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