Doomed

The cell was below the hall, and the hall was below the King, and so the prisoner reasoned that he was at the bottom of everything, which was a restful place to be. There was one window. It was too high to see out of and exactly the right height to let the cold in.

He had been there seven days. He had counted them without minding them.

On the eighth day the door opened and the Guard filled it. The Guard was a wide man who had learned early that a wide man rarely has to finish a sentence.

'Up,' said the Guard.

The prisoner stood.

'You are not afraid,' the Guard observed, as one might observe that a door was ajar.

'Should I be?'

'Everybody is.'

'Then I am sorry to break the pattern,' said the prisoner. 'It must be tiring, being the reason.'

The Guard looked at him a moment longer than he needed to, and then took him up the stairs.

The hall was warm and enormous and the warmth did not reach the corners. The King sat at the far end of it, and the King was bored. This was not a small thing. In that country the King's boredom had a body count.

'This one says nothing,' said the Guard.

'They all say nothing,' said the King, 'eventually.'

Beside the throne the Priest stood with his hands folded, and on the step below him sat the Jester, who was sharpening a stick for no reason anybody could determine.

'What is he charged with?' asked the King.

'Wandering,' said the Guard. 'No trade. No village. No master. He was found on the eastern road talking to nobody.'

'Talking to nobody,' repeated the King. 'About what?'

'He would not say.'

The King leaned forward. He had a face that had once been handsome and had been left out in the weather of itself for thirty years.

'I am told,' he said, 'that men who talk to nobody are either mad or holy, and that the difference is decided afterwards by whoever writes it down. I have no interest in either. I have an interest in not being bored. Amuse me, and you may keep your head until morning. Bore me and you will not see the afternoon.'

The prisoner considered this.

'That is a generous offer,' he said. 'But I should tell you that I do not want it.'

The Jester's stick stopped moving.

'You do not want to live?' said the King.

'I do not mind either way. I have something to give away before I go, and I would rather give it to you than to the wall of that room. If it takes until morning, good. If it takes until the afternoon, also good.'

'And if I have you killed within the hour?'

'Then it will not have been given,' said the prisoner, 'and that would be a waste. Not of me. Of it.'

The King sat back. Something in him that had been asleep for a very long time turned over without waking.

'Then begin,' he said.

And the prisoner said:

'There was once a sheep who looked into a river at night, and could not be sure the face looking back was his own.'