The Last Storyteller (48 page)

And then one summer, on his sun-filled island, it rained. As never before, it rained in the daytime. He had so ordered—or so he believed—that it rain only at night. That happened to be the way the climate in that part of the world ran itself, yet the king believed it to be his doing. When a great storm up on the roof of the world changed some matters here and there, on the king’s island it began to rain during the day
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And it rained all day, every day. The ducks on that island, who had never been very good swimmers, suddenly became champions at paddling. I don’t know if they have paddling at the Olympic Games, but if they had, those ducks would have won all the medals
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The frogs became wonderful swimmers, too. The poor creatures didn’t know at first what to do with all this water, because in the past they had depended on the charity of boys and girls who made special pools for them. Now they jumped and they splashed and they turned somersaults in the abundant water they found everywhere
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It didn’t stop raining all summer, and in the rain the farmers couldn’t plant anything, and it rained all August and September and October and
November and December, and the farmers couldn’t harvest anything, because there was nothing to harvest, and even if there had been the weather was too bad
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The island, therefore, had no food. The people used up all their stores, and by Christmas they had nothing left to eat. The people knew that they were living now in a famine
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They sent envoys from the island out into the world to ask for help. But each country said to them, “Oh, isn’t your king that proud fellow who won’t look at anyone, who will speak only when he wishes and at his own pace and who walks like a tortoise on stilts?”

When their ship sailed home empty-handed, into the harbor in the rain—because it hadn’t stopped raining—everybody fell silent. Their clamor stopped. They said not a word, not a whisper. And then a child, its feet in the water, its cheeks drawn and pale with hunger, spoke the unspeakable
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“So I am going to die,” she cried, “because the king is so proud.”

She was dark-eyed and had straggly hair and a wild look. Everybody turned to see her
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“Tell us what to do,” said an envoy, who wasn’t at all haughty about the wisdom that comes from the mouths of babes
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“If all the children march to the palace, the soldiers won’t kill us—because many of them are our fathers. We will talk to the king, and we will teach him our ways, and we will delight him with our play.”

When the king heard the commotion at his gates, he sent his favorite footman, Faluta, to find out what it was about. The footman returned and said, “Your Royal Majesty of royalness, the children of your subjects have come to see you. They say that they want you to come out and play.”

The king, quite a plump man—he, of course, had his own private store of food—sat up. He looked surprised, but, as Faluta the Footman later reported, he also looked a little pleased
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“Bring them in,” he said. “Let them play here.”

The children flooded in. They examined the buckles on his royal slippers, they fingered the beautiful royal hose that clung tight to his legs, they rubbed the velvet of his robe, they tried on his crown
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To the king’s own surprise, he enjoyed the company of the children. He almost smiled. He showed them the jewels in the crown. And his great ring. And he let them handle the ornamental sword that hung above his throne. He patted their heads
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Standing a little apart from the group, the raggedy girl watched the king carefully. She observed how his head did not turn easily. She perceived that he walked like a stork in pain. She heard his speech, stilted as sour milk. And she knew what to do
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She walked over to the king
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“Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Oh yes, oh yes,” he said. “This is wonderful.”

“Do you feel happy?”

“Oh yes, oh yes.”

You will note that she didn’t call him “Sire” or “Your Royal Majesty” or anything like that. Then she turned to the children and said, “Tell the king why we came here.”

As with one voice, they cried out, “We are hungry, we have no food.”

The king looked startled—in fact, he didn’t know where to look. Finally, after some spluttering, he managed to speak—and he spoke half at his own old, slow pace and half at the pace of the children
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“But. Is. This. My fault entirely, I mean—”

“You’re a king,” said the girl. “You have royal powers. The powers of gods. You must act.”

“But. What. Shall I do, I don’t know—”

The girl said, “Open your storehouses and release the food. But you must serve it to the people yourself, and you must walk among us at our pace, and you must hold conversations with us, and you must see us for what we are.”

The king looked at her carefully and he didn’t speak. But when the next day came, the king went to meet his people. He left the palace, his footman attending him a pace behind. They blinked. Never had they seen such a crowd. Down below them, at the foot of Palace Hill, all the people of the island had gathered. Tables had been set out by the king’s men
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Slowly the king began his descent. In the heat of the moment, he had forgotten that he must not walk as he had always done. So he picked up speed and developed a nice brisk walk. He also turned his head from side to side like a normal person, and not at all like a king
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When the people of the island saw this, some clapped their hands in delight, but their applause didn’t catch on. Until he spoke to one or two. To their astonishment he said, like a normal person, “How do you do?” and “Miserable day, I’m afraid,” and “How are you keeping?” When he had passed by, those people to whom he had just spoken began to applaud
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Soon the entire multitude, despite their weakness, was making a thunderous sound—hands clapping, feet stamping, tables being rapped. The king, touched almost to tears, bowed—and began to ladle out stew
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He found that he enjoyed this task—so much that he couldn’t stop saying so. When he moved on from that sentiment, he began to ask over and over, “Is there something else I can do?”

Nobody dared suggest anything—I mean, who would tell a king what to do? Until he came to a woman he thought he recognized. He didn’t know her—but her face was familiar because it was her daughter who had led the children to the palace
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He asked her, too, “Is there anything else I can do?” and she said, in the forthright way that her daughter had learned, “Yes, there is, sire.” The king looked at her and waited. “Come and live with me and my family for a few days, and you will understand your kingdom better, and your people will love you more.”

The king took a pace back. He looked all around Palace Hill. Word of what the woman had asked went whispering through the crowd. They fell silent—so silent that you could hear the swallows chittering in the eaves overhead, so silent that you could hear the wind in the grass, so silent that you could hear the stream that gurgled down Palace Hill to the river in the valley
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As they waited, the king frowned. They knew what was going through his mind: would this be royal behavior? And still the rain poured down. It plastered his hair to his forehead. It drenched his royal robes. It ran down the faces of the people who looked at him, the woman and her daughter, and the children around them; everywhere the king looked he saw wet, expectant faces
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He spoke. “That is a most gracious invitation,” he said. “And I am happy to accept.”

For the next seven days the king lived in that woman’s house with her husband and her children. They had one room, divided for sleeping arrangements by a rope hanging an old sheet. He ate their pitiably little food, he washed his face in the water they—or he—brought from a stream. He walked at their pace, he spoke in their tempo, and he looked at every wonder to which the children pointed. They all found him to be a most agreeable companion
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On the eighth morning, he stepped from their house, into the pouring rain. As he turned to say, “Goodbye and thank you,” the rain stopped. As
suddenly and definitely as if somebody up in the heavens had turned it off. The king had atoned. And never was there such prosperity on that island as in the following years
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I finished my tale, took in the wide-eyed silence of the children and the pleased smiles of the adults. They asked me where I had first heard it, and I told them that an old lady told it and many more on an island in a lake near Enniskillen. Afterward, they offered me a bed for the night, but I declined. I had other plans; I would begin to make the tale I had told come true.

I only had to make a short journey. Outside the village, travelers had camped. They had a horse-drawn caravan painted in the usual bright colors, and a couple of ponies grazing while tethered to the van. A fire glowed, neither high nor bright. Earlier, driving past, I had seen an elderly man and woman. Their ages I could not tell.

Though it was near midnight, they hadn’t yet gone to bed, wherever that was. She sat on the step of the wagon, he by the fire, smoking a cigarette and crooning to himself.

You’ll have seen, children, groups like these, usually larger, with children and extended families, and maybe a dog or two and a donkey or a mule. They suffered from us—we were what they called “the settled people,” who lived in houses. The believed us to be bullies, we believed them to be thieves, and I know that much of our demonizing of them had to do with the fact that we treated them so badly.

Although they were supposed to have descended from our dispossessed chieftains, people all over the country moved them on with sticks and kicks. Once or twice, they burned them out, setting fire to their tents, their animals—and their children.

In terms of bloodline, I didn’t know where to place them. Some claimed Romany blood, ancient tribes. None liked the names we gave them; instead of “tinkers,” they wanted to be called “tinsmiths,” and,
indeed, they had a rightful claim with their hammers and their repairs. They didn’t like “Gypsies” either.

“We didn’t come from Egypt,” they said, “and we never did,” and they’d been known to fight anyone who said otherwise.

They drank too much and fought too much. Many of them trashed the roadsides where they camped and the pubs in which they drank. Reach for the word “pariah” and you get some idea of their status.

I parked the car a little beyond their caravan and walked back. The man by the fire had a bottle in his hand—beer, not whiskey—and he slugged it as I approached.

His wife said something I didn’t catch; they spoke rapidly, some of it in a dialect.

“God save you all,” I said.

The man with the bottle grunted; this wasn’t the first time I’d been mistaken for a priest.

“Shtand up when the man talks to yeh,” ordered the woman, and said not another word.

What had I expected? That they’d jump at my offer? They didn’t. With no input from the woman, the man stalled. I pressed hard, finally showing him a roll of cash I had prepared. He wanted to finger the notes; I refused, said he couldn’t touch them unless and until we had a deal. He walked around the fire, threw the empty bottle into the field, and walked around the fire some more.

And he muttered all the time, the same words in a kind of speech tune. By standing close to him I picked it up; he was saying, over and over, “I dunno, I dunno, I dunno now, I dunno.”

But I pressed him, and he agreed. We struck the deal that I had been thinking about for some time. In return for cash and my car, and most of its contents except my essential personal effects, he would give me a leather satchel that hung from the door. Made by his wife, as I had guessed from having seen it earlier, it had a pilgrim sturdiness. Over and above that, though, came the concession to which he had been reluctant: I would live and travel with him and his wife for a month.

Ask me why. You know the answer. Atonement. Penance. Restitution. The stories I was telling had led me into a deeper self, a place of greater recognition. Down there, in the deep fastnesses of my soul, I had learned that true repentance comes harder. For a man who liked his comforts, a
fastidious man, what colder shriving could I have than to go where I belonged—into the greatest daily hardship and unsanitary unpleasantness that existed in my own country?

It proved worse than I had imagined. I have to be careful here, lest I give the impression of criticizing or decrying people who had scant control over their lives. All they had—and they told me this frequently—was the freedom not to be “settled,” meaning housed with permanent neighbors, in a crowded urban setting. That was the shape of government programs for travelers. For them it meant the death of the life they cherished—one on the open road.

Yet although I don’t entertain in me a jot of criticism or judgment of them, I must report things as I find them. In a month I saw neither person wash. They seemed oblivious of such need. Due to the odor and the cramped space, I didn’t ask to sleep in their caravan; I slept where they put me, in old blankets down between the wheels. Night after night, hail, rain, or snow—fortunately, we had almost none of those—I crawled in and lay down, deep under their wagon, in what most people would call rags.

During the day I walked out and washed my own face in streams and tried to keep clean, especially as I was visiting houses within twenty miles, telling tales if they’d have me. Some didn’t. During the night I would wake up and hear muttering over my head, and never know which of them spoke, and whether it was sleep-talking.

Over matters of sanitation and the like, I draw a veil; all I need say is that I had never before been shouted at by passing children because I looked like a tramp.

As to food, you may dismiss any notion of romantic stew, of rabbit and game, caught and killed on rich estates by lovable rogues. We had tea, endless tea, without milk or sugar, unendurably strong, and we ate stale bread mostly, bought or pilfered or received through charity in the woman’s daily round selling her lucky heather.