Mirror

“But how do you know?” said the Jester.

It was the first thing he had said from the floor rather than from the side of his mouth, and the hall turned to look at him.

“Know what?” said the prisoner.

“What he was thinking. Your sheep. You said, he wondered if he had spent his whole life seeing himself as he would like to be seen. Nobody knows that about anybody. I do not know that about me.”

The Jester spread his hands.

“So either you are making it up, which is fine, I make things up for a living and they pay me in soup — or you have put something of yourself inside the sheep, which for a storyteller is either honesty or a trick.”

The prisoner was quiet for a long moment.

It was not the silence of a man caught out.

It was the silence of a man who has been walking for a great distance and has just been asked, kindly, where he is going.

“That,” he said at last, “is a better question than any I was asked in nine years on the road.”

“I get a lot of practice,” said the Jester. “Nobody listens to me either.”

“I do not know what he was thinking,” said the prisoner slowly. “I know what it is like to think it. Those are not the same, and I have been saying them as if they were.”

He looked at his hands.

“A story may happen to another creature, yet find the same thing happening inside you. I have carried this one for a long time without asking what it was making of me.”

“And what have you made?” said the King.

“I am finding out,” said the prisoner, “by telling you. That is why I did not want the chair.”

The Priest made a small dismissive noise.

“He is confessing that he is inventing it.”

“No,” said the Jester, unexpectedly. “He is confessing that he is only now understanding it.”

He turned the sharpened stick over in his fingers.

“That is the opposite.”

The King looked from one to the other and found, to his considerable annoyance, that he wanted to know which of them was right.

So he did a thing he had not done since he was nine years old.

He asked.

“Which is it?” he said.

And the Guard, standing at the door where he always stood, noticed that the King had asked a question without already having the answer — and filed it away, as a soldier files away a crack in a wall.