The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (6 page)

The king came to her at dawn, before embarking on his trip. He was alone.

— You tried to humiliate me, Beit. You know that’s a crime.

— Your Majesty asked for a prediction. Perhaps you’d like another one?

— I would not.

— Last night I dreamed of a man who tried to lay the sky with stone.

— And . . . what happened?

— It tumbled down on him.

— Could it have been a castle? Up on a mountain?

— I don’t know, Your Majesty. I didn’t have a good view. It isn’t easy sleeping underground.

Beit was given a suite of three rooms with a balcony overlooking the royal gardens, and, in place of a sentry, a pair of footmen. They brought her cheese and grapes, which she ate while Ruth and Leah tended to her braids, and Elke the seamstress took her orders for a whole silken wardrobe.

Chaim found her there. (Every marble vault in the royal court reverberated with rumors of her restored fortunes, the king’s abandoned building plans.) She received the courtier with a lady’s grace, and offered him a bunch of purple grapes. She told him about the glorious gowns she’d have soon. Then she asked him, coy like a courtesan, where the king planned now to erect his new castle. Chaim had no answer. She took back her fruit, and suggested he find out. She turned to Elke. She asked when she could expect her couture. The seamstress told her that His Majesty immediately required a new doublet suitable for a fox hunt, but promised her a gown that would garner marriage vows in time for the upcoming pageant.

Beit supped at the royal table that night, where the king toasted her talent as a seer, and asked what new visions she had to share. She frowned. She took a gulp of port. Then, fixing his gaze with her turquoise eyes, she told him of a fox who so admired the cut of a hunter’s silk jacket that it gave up its own fur coat.

Before the courtiers could laugh at her, the king asked if the hunter was wearing a red doublet. She nodded sagely. Triumphant, he commanded his retinue never again to doubt Beit. He ordered them to venerate her.

They obeyed. She’d no need of new gowns, so tightly did they cling to her. The gossipy patter of their flirtation gave her fodder for a thousand and one dreams with which to amuse His petulant Highness. For a man who has no time for history, an oracle is the ultimate entertainment, and it made no difference to the king whether Beit foretold the apocalypse or the names of that evening’s supper guests, as long as the prediction proved correct.

Everyone adored Beit. Only Chaim was distraught by her behavior, the way she wallowed in courtly rumor, teasing it from men beneath an abundance of cleavage, letting them caress her wherever they pleased, as long as they whispered fresh intrigues in her ear. He was as impressed as anyone by her foresight, naturally, yet he wondered when, given all the revelry that consumed her night and day, she even had time to dream.

Chaim had time aplenty, and, in his sleep, Beit was always with him alone, far from the courtiers he’d grown up with, or the palace where he’d been born. She was a shepherdess again, he a woodsman, and their whole wealth was in children, a veritable kingdom of them. The only trouble was that, unlike Beit’s charmed dreams, poor Chaim’s never came to pass.

In fact, since Chaim had no talent for gossip, Beit barely noticed him anymore. His lowly social rank ensured that he was never seated near her at supper. Occasionally, he found her with other courtiers in the gardens—stumbled over a foursome of feet entangled in the hedgerow—but such circumstances proved unsuitable for conversation. If he wanted her attention again, much less to share his dreams with her, he’d need a miracle, or at least a good scandal.

He attended more closely to the king. He lingered while His Majesty received ministers and soldiers and foreign emissaries. And not more than a week passed before he had his wish.

He wished immediately that he hadn’t. For his miracle, the scandal, concerned Beit’s native land, where—whether by chance or design—the king had found a mountain suitable for his castle in the sky. Chaim watched as His Majesty summoned the local noble, and offered, by way of compensation for the land, the peasants of the region as serfs, to be property of his family in perpetuity. Ever since the flood, the noble had needed free labor more than pretty scenery. He agreed.

Late that night, Chaim found Beit in her rooms, asleep atop a bed so high he had to climb a ladder. He drew back the lace canopy and gazed at her, softer and stiller than the litter of pillows surrounding her. He grasped her hand, sending a wisp of expectation across her lips. She opened her eyes. Wide.

— Who invited
you
up here?

— I have to talk to you.

— Now?

— It’s about the king.

— I already know everything.

— You know he’s selling your family into slavery?

— I don’t have family here, silly. I’m practically royalty. Is this your idea of gossip?

— Everyone in your village has been given to the local noble, in exchange for a mountain where His Majesty is going to build his alpine castle.

— You’re boring me, Chaim. Please go away.

Beit turned her head and shut her eyes. But the sleep that embraced her wasn’t gentle anymore. She was assaulted by nightmares. Folks she’d known before filed by in tattered work-clothes. She called to them, but they didn’t answer. She saw that they’d neither eyes nor ears. Then she heard what she was saying:
Are you my family?

When Leah woke her, Beit was sure that what Chaim had told her was true. She needed to see him immediately, not so much to ask him questions as to say that she felt what he did. But she couldn’t slip away. The maids had her by the braids and the seamstress was lacing her in a gown, for the day of the pageant had come.

Revelers arrived from every town and village in the kingdom. Nobles and merchants and peasants shared the streets, and even exchanged greetings, all distinctions flattened in the shadow of His Majesty’s palace.

The pageant was the monarch’s annual tribute to his own benevolence, funded by a nonproductivity tax he assessed against sleep. All day long, his subjects tirelessly ate mutton cooked on iron spits and drank wine by the bucket, while he addressed them from a pedestal up on his castle’s grand balcony.

That year, after observing them awhile from the overhead perspective he found so agreeable, he decided to give them an unexpected treat. He had Beit brought to the balcony to relate, in front of everybody, her latest dream. Beit was legendary by then, the country’s first celebrity, and, while the king had to shout to get attention, her small voice silenced the whole city. She blinked her turquoise eyes. And found, effortlessly, Chaim’s gaze.

— Are you sure Your Majesty wants to know what I’ve foreseen?

— Of course I do. Why else would I call for you?

— I dreamed . . .

— Dreamed what?

— Dreamed that Your Majesty secretly sold my whole village into slavery just to build another showy castle.

— You don’t know what you’re talking about. You never have visions like that.

— In my dream, you stole my family’s freedom, made them serfs of the local noble, and I have a premonition, Your Majesty, that you’ll do it to other people as well.

— It’s a lie, Beit. Your dreams deceive you.

— Everybody knows they always come true.

— You’re a fool. Would you stake your life on this?

— Yes.

The king’s subjects no longer stood by idly, gnawing on His Majesty’s spit-fired offal. Peasants were shouting, as nobles shuffled behind castle walls for royal protection until the masses were oppressed again. The king could barely be heard over the din. He cursed Beit. He begged his subjects to trust him. He bade them see for themselves that she was wrong, demanded that the peasants send a delegation to her town. He offered them horses, the swifter to be done with this business, and sent Beit to the dungeon again, lest she try to run from the inevitable.

Nobody visited her prison. Armed sentries blocked the stairs. When the rats came, she’d no food to share. She gave them her lace collar, with which they made a nest where they could leer at her in leisure. In timeless darkness, where hours loitered for weeks, she didn’t know how many days passed without sleep, and couldn’t recollect when she was overcome with delirium. She stared at her hands, the translucent blue skin—and then she saw nothing at all.

A bag over her head . . . Men’s voices . . . Special commission . . . Thorough investigation . . . No truth to Beit’s prediction . . . Formal charges: treason . . . To the gallows . . . Beit the liar . . . ! Death to her . . . ! Death to her . . . !

They marched Beit several miles, every step a stumble.

They prodded her with sticks while she walked, and pelted her with rocks when she fell. They bloodied her like a martyr. And cursed her like the devil.

The gallows stood on a bridge, river underfoot, and rope overhead. The hangman noosed her neck, under her burlap hood. The king stepped forward, and asked if, in her present condition, there was anything else she’d care to predict. She heard herself answer with what sounded like pique, but she knew was not, for it had come in her delirium: the sensation of floating again. She told His Majesty that the rope would snap.

— Snap your little neck, my pretty.

— I’ve lied before. But my future is no longer yours.

The king stepped in front of the hangman. He threw the lever that dropped the trap under her feet. She fell. The rope went taut. And slack.

The king’s sentries would not follow her into the river, a dizzying drop into rapids that frothed as if rabid, and were known to swallow men whole. The king’s archers lowered their arrows. Nor would His Majesty issue orders to pursue her. For hours, some said days, he stared at the broken rope, mute.

Of course, others talked. By the time Beit’s battered body reached her native village, and her brothers dragged her from the water, the whole country knew of her latest feat. They no longer called her a liar, but questioned the honesty of their monarch.

The local noble wouldn’t come near her, yet hundreds of others visited while she convalesced. She slept for a year, and then two more. Folks speculated on her dreams, then lost interest, as ever more of the future slipped past. Finally only one man remained, a stranger who some claimed (based on his fronds of mustache and awkward speech) had been born a courtier. He fed her broth and hummed lullabies in her ear.

Then, one day, when he was alone with her, she opened her turquoise eyes, and grasped his hand.

— Chaim?

— Yes?

— Am I asleep?

— Not anymore.

— Are you also awake?

— As never before.

As the years passed, the couple came to feel as one. Finally all that separated them were Beit’s dreams, a lapse that grew unbearable in their otherwise seamless existence. One night, she whispered to him about the years she’d slept, and why they’d gone on so long: She’d been a shepherdess again, he a woodsman, and their whole wealth was in children.

All of that happened, he reminded her, exactly as she’d described. She quieted him. She said that the dream, her vision, ended like this. She held his hands. And, together, they felt their lives float past.

GIMMEL THE GAMBLER

Into a kingdom as small and orderly as a widow’s vegetable garden once wandered a peddler named Gimmel. He was not an ordinary tradesman, for he carried no goods with him. He’d neither the customary donkey nor cart, and folks scarcely noticed him at first. But in a country as orderly as this (even tombstones were alphabetical), and as tidy (even the forest floor was swept), a man without evident purpose was bound to make people curious.

On market day, they found Gimmel apart from the other peddlers, sitting on the ground with a couple of coins in hand.
Are you a lender?
they asked.
A money changer?
(While they had no need for either, never living beyond their means, nor traveling far, they’d occasionally heard tradesmen mention such exotic professions.) He shook his head. He was a gambler, he said. A peddler of chance.

They considered him more closely, then. Traders were a rough breed, naturally, but Gimmel made the others look like burghers: He lacked an eye, and three fingers on one hand. He’d no hair on his head, and his skin was burnished like a workman’s apron where it wasn’t covered up with an old burlap sack. And yet he was so perfectly oblivious to the misfortunes that had befallen his flesh, it made scant impression on those he met. None of the people gathered around him asked why his ear was torn, how his nose got bent.
What’s a gambler?
they wanted to know.
What’s a chance?

From his tobacco pouch, Gimmel took two small gems. He showed people how both were cut the same, perfect cubes of clear green, each facet drilled with a different pattern. Sides numbered one to six, he explained, letting folks examine. All approved of their evident orderliness. He cupped the stones again and said they were dice.

— You sell them?

— You roll them.

— Why?