6th Interval

The King did not sleep.

He lay in the dark and found that there was not one of him in the bed but a great many --- a whole court assembled inside him, the way a court does: five kings and four queens, each one a different voice, each one certain it alone wore the crown. They did not agree, and they had never agreed, and he had simply been in the habit of calling whichever one was loudest by his own name.

One of them wanted the man dead and wanted it the way a thirsty man wants water: because the court had assembled, because the Priest had written something, because a king who bends is a king who ends.

One of them wanted to go down the stairs again and was ashamed of wanting it.

One of them, and this was the worst, did not care at all, and was already thinking about the spring levies.

And there was a small one, nine years old, standing in a yard, being made to watch.

He sat up. He would have given the whole eastern province, at that moment, to know which of them was the King --- for he could feel, behind all those quarrelling voices, something that was none of them, that had no crown and no name, that only watched them. And he suspected, with a kind of cold, that this was the only one of him that was awake.

Outside, the sky went the colour that is not yet light and is no longer night, and below him, in the stone, a man who was not afraid slept soundly, and it was this, more than anything the man had said in forty-one nights, that the King could not forgive and could not stop thinking about.