The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (5 page)

Alef helped him to bed, and bade him a good night. The guest lay down on the straw mattress without removing cloak or hat. He pretended to sleep. And then he really did.

Some hours later, he was awoken by a noise in the other room. Without moving, he strained to hear if the couple was speaking of him. But the utterances weren’t in any ordinary language. He concentrated on each syllable until it came to him that the two of them weren’t making conversation. They were making love.

He waited awhile, until they were quiet. He waited some time more. He gripped his crook. Slowly he stood up. He stepped out of the bedroom.

The couple lay on the floor by the hearth, entwined in sleep. In the embers’ glow, he could see that they were naked. Alef’s hands, creased with years, folded over Chaya’s shoulders. Her gray hair fell across his chest like an early frost. Their ancient guest crouched close. He saw the faint line of a smile where their wrinkled faces touched.

He went away before the light arrived. At the foot of the forest, he dropped his crook. Coming into the clearing where he lived, he tossed away his hat and cloak. The dybbuk went home more mystified than he’d been when he’d left.

He peered inside his pickling barrel. Ever since Chaya had freely given up her soul, he’d wondered whether having such a thing was really so valuable. He’d comforted himself with the torments of the soulless folks who wandered in the forest. But to look at Chaya and Alef . . . He gazed into his vat, and he no longer saw what he’d wanted.

The demon neglected his great occupation after that. He concerned himself with his collection of precious spiders, and with cultivating mushrooms in hues that illuminated the night. These hobbies pleased him. He grew so affable that the wolves no longer feared him. They visited often, serenading the brightest orbs in his night garden as if he were raising new moons.

Gradually the pickling barrel dried out. The wood warped and cracked. The glands shriveled. The dybbuk didn’t even notice as they dissipated, and the forest dwellers dwindled.

At last, only the souls of Alef and Chaya remained. They shrunk into each other, creasing into a faint smile. And as they lost substance, some say, the demon’s own soullessness passed away.

BEIT THE LIAR

One day, a peasant named Beit foretold a cataclysmic flood. She’d been lying in a field, tending the local noble’s sheep, when sleep overcame her, and she felt her body float away, as if on water.

To most folks, the meaning of Beit’s dream was clear: Peasant families in the valley promptly hauled everything they could up the nearest hillside. But the local noble, whose celestial observations forecast conditions as dry as the charts on which his learned astrology relied, forbade his servants from so much as thinking about the weather.

When the rains came, he’d no time to reconsider. While well fortified against human intruders, his castle couldn’t hold back the water, nor could he take command of the rising river, for it was a tributary of the king. All his property was washed away—sheep and servants and star charts—and he saved his family only by barricading them in the celestial observatory, where raindrops the size of gunshot pelted them while they gazed down upon their ruptured legacy.

Several days passed before the land dried, the river returned to its bed, and the peasants came home again. By then the noble had chosen an appropriate retribution for their desertion: Beit’s prediction had brought on his misfortune, so he’d have the girl hanged in front of them. He demanded that they surrender her. But they couldn’t comply, as she’d already been seized by the king.

Nobody could say how word of Beit’s witchcraft had so swiftly reached His Majesty. No one knew by which route she’d been taken away. The noble had no official recourse. An avowed pragmatist, he had to satisfy himself with the thought that, even if he couldn’t get his own rope around her throat, the king’s hangman was an old hand at noosing insolent little peasant girls.

Yet justice is never so simple: Far from dead in the royal gallows, Beit slept that night in the king’s palace, high on a feather bed, in a cloud of down pillows.

Her first audience with His Majesty had taken place in his stables, amid the dust of her arrival from the countryside. He was a young king, and brash. (He’d banned music because the notes couldn’t be played all at once, and also dance, which he deemed needlessly circuitous.) In the midnight dark, he’d scarcely noticed Beit’s filthy freckled peasant face or her tattered burlap frock. He’d fixed his gaze on her turquoise eyes and demanded that she explain her gypsy tricks.

— I was tending sheep. I fell asleep.

— Then you’re a seer.

— I like to dream.

— From now on, your dreams are mine.

She’d merely shrugged in reply, and, by the time she thought to ask the king a few questions of her own, His Majesty was gone.

•   •   •

In the morning, two maids bathed her, and, while they combed her hair, a seamstress fitted her in a white silk gown. The fabric was lighter, and cooler, than her own bare skin, and, after the servants left her, she had to keep glancing in the mirror to make sure she was not standing stark naked, as she’d heard happened to certain emperors.

Her reflection delighted her. She’d never encountered a looking glass before, and had so little sense of her own appearance that it counted as a new friend. How much more entertaining it was than Beit’s peasant family: She and her reflection spun themselves dizzy, and exchanged more curtsies than she could count. Then luncheon was served, a feast for one, set on a cloth of fine linen, and it was late afternoon by the time she thought to leave her room. She slid on a pair of kidskin slippers. She set out to explore her realm.

Beit had no recollection of the palace from the night before, its marbleized vastness and gilded splendor, and still less did she recognize, in crown of state and clutch of courtiers, the prickly little king she’d met in the stables. He beckoned her. He presented the peasant girl to his retinue. He bade her tell him the future.

— The future?

— I want to know your dreams.

— I slept so well, Your Majesty. I think I didn’t have any.

— Will you tonight?

— How would I know?

— You disappoint me, Beit. See that it doesn’t happen again.

A sentry returned her to her room and locked the door behind her. She looked at her reflection in the mirror. No longer was it so much fun. She might even have missed her family, were it not for her new silk gown and the royal accommodations. Then came supper, a beef roast served with a carafe of wine, from which she drank until she felt giddy again: Most girls dreamed of being princesses, and here she practically was one.

That night Beit took care not to sleep so soundly, to be sure she’d have visions for the king. She set aside all her quilts and pillows. Yet, even sprawled across bare mattress board, Beit passed the night in one blind stretch.

While the maids made no comments about her odd nocturnal habits when they brought her breakfast, they couldn’t help but gasp the following morning, upon finding her asleep on the stone-cold floor. As they brushed Beit’s hair, the younger, who went by the name Leah, asked if she didn’t care for the amenities in His Majesty’s palace. Beit shook her head and then, before Leah could catch it, a tear dropped into the girl’s silken lap.

— I don’t dream anymore.

— Living like this, who’d need to, miss?

— Me, if I don’t want to upset His Majesty.

— In that case, why not pretend?

— He’d know, because it wouldn’t come true.

— Tell him he’ll eat pheasant for supper tonight.

— How do you know?

— My fiancé works in His Majesty’s pantry. He always tells me what scraps we’ll soon be eating.

While Leah tied up Beit’s braids, the other maid, who was called Ruth, counseled the girl to be careful: Beit might be expelled if she admitted that her visions had left her, but Ruth had spent enough years in the king’s employ to witness the execution of a dozen seers who’d misperceived the future.

His Majesty came to Beit’s room that afternoon. The sentry opened her door. She was sitting on the floor, absently toying with a bit of satin ribbon the maids had left there. She looked up. Behind the king stood a full complement of cour tiers, arranged, in colored livery, by degree of royal favor.

The king snatched the ribbon from Beit’s fingers. He tied it in a noose.

— Is this a new method of divination? Peasants are the strangest creatures. Come, my little girl. Won’t you tell us the future?

Beit glanced at the noose in his hands. She touched her throat. And then she looked around the room, at the canopy bed as capacious as the hovel in which her whole family lived, and the marble table where were served, for her delectation alone, meals hearty enough to feed her entire town. She took in the mirror, its reflection of her dimpled round face, crowned in braids fancier than those worn by the local noble’s daughters, her plump body frocked in silk finer than the fabric in which the noble cloaked his wife. She met the king’s gaze with her turquoise eyes.

— I dreamed of pheasants.

— What about them?

— There were many, maybe a hundred. They all landed, one at a time, in small round ponds, and nothing under the sun could make them rise again.

— But, you fool, pheasants live on land.

— I’m sure Your Majesty is right. I’m just a senseless peasant. Who can say what my visions mean?

The king didn’t answer. He just laughed at her. He slipped the noose onto his pinky, and pulled on it until the ribbon snapped. After that, he left Beit.

Just before the sentry shut the door, the last in His Majesty’s retinue picked up the bits of satin from the floor. Putting them in her hands, he whispered that he, at least, felt for her.

— You believe in my dreams?

— Those don’t matter.

— They’re all I have.

— Not necessarily.

— Without dreams, I’m just a peasant. You were born a noble. You can’t understand.

— My mother was a court seer. After her visions faltered, my father was noble enough to save me, but not her.

— What do you feel for me, then?

— I don’t feel alone.

The king was still carrying on about the dumb shepherd girl, and how ignorant she was of birds, when supper was served. He sat at the head of a table so long that guests arrived on horseback, and messengers carried conversation, inscribed on slates of ivory, from chair to chair. He sank fork and knife into his meat. He took a bite.

— What is this food?

— Pheasant, Your Majesty.

The king raised his eyes from his plate. He watched servants set down dishes in front of his ninety-nine guests. He dropped his silverware.

— Small round ponds.

— What did His Majesty say?

— They all landed, one at a time, in small round ponds, and nothing under the sun could make them rise again.

— Is His Majesty reciting poetry?

The king stood. He ordered that Beit be sent to the dungeon, and served only gruel. Then he shut himself in his rooms.

In her cold stone cell, Beit no longer had to worry about sleeping too deeply for dreams to reach her. She couldn’t even find a place to rest her head. She paced to keep away the rats, and periodically warmed her cheeks with tears.

At around midnight, she heard footsteps on the staircase, met by the gendarme assigned to guard her. The visitor spoke to her jailer in a familiar voice, lower than the king’s, and softer. The soldier let the man pass, and Beit saw, approaching her rusty cage, one of His Majesty’s entourage: the courtier who’d felt for her. She’d scarcely noticed his visage when they’d last met, the sad dark face behind great fronds of mustache. Now he was all she had, a liveried aristocrat outside her cell, pressing against the grille, as if he were
her
prisoner.

— You must be hungry. I’ve brought food from His Majesty’s table.

— What is it?

— Pheasant.

— Then I was right. You’ve come to free me?

— I would if I had a key. You made a fool of the king, Beit. Be grateful you’re not dead.

— He wanted to know the future.

— He never knows what he wants until he’s had it already. But I’ve spent nights down here. Everyone does, now and then. Eventually he’ll come around.

— When?

— He leaves tomorrow for a week. His moods improve with travel.

— I can’t survive here that long.

— You’re a peasant.

— I was one. Where’s he going? Can’t it wait?

— He’s riding to the mountains, to build a castle.

— What’s wrong with this one? Aside from the dungeon.

— Who knows, Beit? I have to go. If His Majesty finds me with you, he’ll hang us both on the same rope.

— Please just tell me your name?

— You can call me Chaim.

Then he was gone. She shared her pheasant with the rats, on the condition that they stop harassing her, but, when the food was done, they pretended to have made no such bargain. She couldn’t lie down or even sit. Lazy Beit had never stood so long in her life as she did that night.