Retelling

He stopped at dawn.

He stopped in the middle of a sentence, which the Jester later said was the cleverest thing he had ever seen a dying man do.

'Go on,' said the King.

'The sun is up,' said the prisoner. 'I was promised until morning. It is morning. Do what you like.'

There was a silence of the kind that costs money.

'You are bargaining,' said the King.

'No. If I were bargaining I would be frightened, and you would smell it, and you would enjoy it, and then you would kill me anyway, because that is what bargaining is for. I am tired, and I would like to sit down.'

'Give him a chair,' said the King, 'and bring him back tonight.'

The Guard did not move for a moment.

Then he brought a chair.

That night, and the night after, and the night after that, the story went on.

The sheep left his flock.

The sheep met an eagle and a mountain.

The Priest listened with his head slightly tilted, the way a man listens for a wrong note rather than for a tune.

'This Good Shepherd of theirs,' the Priest said on the fourth night. 'You understand that this is our Lord. You are telling our scripture with wool on it.'

'Am I?'

'You are, and I am not certain you have permission.'

'Then take it back,' said the prisoner pleasantly. 'I have no use for a thing I need permission to say.'

'Careful,' said the Priest.

'Why? You have a whole congregation who are careful. What would you want with one more?'

The Jester laughed once, like a dropped plate, and then looked at his shoes.

'And what is your interest in this?' the King asked the Priest afterwards, when the prisoner had been taken down. 'It is a story about livestock.'

'It is a story about a sheep leaving the flock, Majesty, and I have a flock.'

The Priest smoothed his sleeve.

'So, if I may say it, do you.'

The King did not answer.

But he thought about the word after they had gone, and he did not enjoy it.

For eleven nights he had been buying the end of a story with the life of the man telling it, and it had not once occurred to him that this was a strange way to do business.

What he had begun to notice -- and he would have denied it under oath -- was that he was no longer waiting for the story to finish.

He was waiting for the night.