5th Interval

They took the prisoner back down to his cell before the fires were banked.

The Guard walked beside him without saying through here. By now, the prisoner knew that his silence could mean something too.

He sat with his back against the stone and found that he could not go on with the story.

Not because he was tired.

Because the Jester's question had got underneath it.

How do you know what he was thinking?

He had been telling it for nights on end the way a man walks a road he knows in the dark, and now he had been asked to look at the road.

So he went back to the beginning instead.

Not to tell it.

To stand in it.

A hillside.

Two hundred sheep with their heads down.

Grass, and the sound of grass being eaten, and above it all a sky doing nothing in particular.

A young sheep lifting his head and asking why they were there, and the flock going on eating.

He had not thought of it in years without thinking of what came after.

Tonight he let it be only itself: the grass, the sky, the question with nothing yet attached to it.

Something in his chest loosened that he had not known was held.

Above him, in a room with a fire in it, the King lay awake and asked a servant what the eastern road looked like, and the servant, terrified, said that it was a road, Majesty, and had grass beside it.