Last Crown

The King came down to the cell on the forty-first night, alone, which no king in that line had ever done.

He had left the crown on the chair.

This was not humility.

He had simply found, standing at the top of the stairs, that he could not carry it down them, and had been unable to explain to himself why.

'You are not to tell anyone I was here,' he said.

'I will be dead in the morning,' said the prisoner. 'I am the safest man in the building.'

The King sat down on the step.

He had not sat below another man since he was a child, and his body did not know how to do it, and made a poor job of it.

'I want the end of it,' he said.

'You have had the end of it. There is a sheep on a hill and he does not know what it is worth. That is where his story stops. Mine stops here.'

'Then tell me something else.'

The King looked at his own hands, which were not a king's hands at this distance; they were an ageing man's, and one of them had a scar he had got falling out of a tree at seven years old, before there was any of this.

'Tell me what I am.'

'You know what you are.'

'I am the King.'

'That is what you do,' said the prisoner. 'It is very good work and somebody has to. I asked what you are.'

The King was silent for a long time.

Somewhere above them a door closed and a man laughed and it was nothing to do with either of them.

'When I was nine,' he said at last, 'my father had a man's hands taken off in the yard for a debt of a dozen coins. I was made to watch, so that I would learn.'

He looked at his hands again.

'And I did learn. I learned that there was a thing you could be, in which nothing reached you, and I climbed inside it that afternoon, and I have not once come out.'

'And is there anybody still in there?'

'I do not know,' said the King. 'That is what I came down to ask you.'

'Then there is,' said the prisoner.

The King looked at him.

'A crown does not wonder whether it is empty.'

The King put his face in his hands, briefly, the way a man does when he is very tired and there is nobody to see, and then he took it out again and was the King.

'I cannot stop it now,' he said. 'The court has assembled. The Priest has written something. There are eight hundred men who obey me because they believe I cannot be moved, and if I am moved by a vagrant with a story, then by the spring there will be nothing here to obey at all.'

'I know,' said the prisoner. 'I am not asking you to stop it. I never was.'

'Then what in God's name have you been doing for forty-one nights?'

'Giving it away,' said the prisoner, 'before I put it down. It is no good to me and it was never mine to keep.'

He looked up.

'You keep saying my people, Majesty. Thirty thousand of them. Somebody is going to have to be awake for all of that, and it is not going to be me.'

The King went up the stairs.

He picked up the crown from the chair and stood holding it for a while.