Sojourner

'You were a shepherd,' said the King.

It was not a question, and it had taken him forty nights to arrive at it.

'I was,' said the prisoner.

'Where?'

'North. A long valley with a river in it that is black at night and brown in the day, though everybody there will tell you it is silver, because that is what their grandmothers told them.' He almost smiled. 'Two hundred head. I knew all of them. I could tell you which one limped and which one bullied and which one would stand in the rain when there was a perfectly good tree.'

'And you left them.'

'I left them.'

'Why?'

'Because one of them looked at me,' said the prisoner, 'and I understood that I had no idea what it was like to be looked at from inside a sheep. And once you have wondered that, you cannot go back to counting them.'

The Priest stirred. 'So the sheep in the story is you.'

'No,' said the prisoner. 'Heryshaf is himself. But I recognised his question, and perhaps you have too. That is the only reason to tell it.'

'That is an evasion.'

'Yes,' agreed the prisoner. 'It is also true. Both things happen.'

The King was looking at him with an expression the court had never seen on him and could not name, because it had no precedent there. It was the expression of a man doing arithmetic he does not want the answer to.

'You have been telling me,' the King said slowly, 'for forty nights, the story of a sheep whose search has somehow become your own, to a man who could end your life at any moment. Why?'

'Because it is not mine any more.' The prisoner said this quite lightly. 'That is what I came to say and I have been forty nights getting to it. A thing you have learned is not yours. It is only lodging with you. And the rent falls due.'

'And what,' said the King, 'is all of it worth? All of it. Nine years, two hundred sheep, an eagle, a mountain, a queen under the ground. What is all you have learned, worth?'

The Jester stopped breathing.

'I do not know yet,' said the prisoner. 'Ask me at the block. That is the only place the question has an honest answer.'

'Blasphemy,' said the Priest, but quietly, and to nobody, and he did not look up when he said it.