The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six Read online

  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?

  — So that you’ve something to bet on.

  Gimmel found that it wasn’t easy to explain betting to these people, who had never known anything but certainty. First he compared it to choosing which crop to plant without being sure when summer would come, but in their country they had calculations that named the seasons in advance, to eliminate risk. Then he took love as an analogy: You gamble on the girl you wed. That confused them still more, for all marriages were equally desireless, to eradicate covetousness.

  The country was too rigidly defined for metaphor. So Gimmel decided to demonstrate instead. He showed how to lay money down, guess what number will come up, and toss.

  — How can you be certain of which way they’ll fall?

  — You can’t, unless you’re a cheat.

  — What’s a cheat?

  — Someone who’d rather win than bet.

  Gradually he taught a few people the game. When folks wanted to bet on the number one, because it came first, he had to show them that two dice always add up to double that. Thus he earned their respect: Never before had they encountered a tradesman who was also a mathematician.

  Money passed back and forth all afternoon in his corner of the market square, without a thought of cows or bushels of wheat: Gambling was not only entertaining but also worry-free, and soon Gimmel was more mobbed than all the other peddlers combined. Chance, pure as gold and free as air, was the kingdom’s latest luxury.

  Gimmel came out just enough ahead that evening to buy some supper, with a coin left over to gamble the following morning. He strolled into the forest, where the floor was as smooth and soft as a rich man’s bed. He lay on his back, and fell asleep counting constellations, God’s dice roll with the universe.

  In this country, the king was a very busy man. All day and night he dragged a wooden ladder back and forth across the floor of his palace library, researching. Years before, he’d tried assigning some of the work to advisers, but none of them could be relied on to assign every word its right weight, let alone to extract from whole passages their exact measure. In those books were encoded the rules by which the country ran, traditions so precisely honed that the whole kingdom could be torn asunder by a single error, as an entire mill can break down on account of one faulty pin. Every conceivable subject was contained in those books, a thousand volumes, each as heavy as a man could lift.

  They walled the room, a fortress of tradition, which, aside from the ladder, had as furniture only a table large enough to support one tome.

  Most of the king’s day was spent looking up routine matters, such as whether the forest floor had to be scrubbed with soap after a rainstorm. Grateful as the king was for not needing to make such decisions, other cases were horribly complicated by the number of precedents that simultaneously had to be taken into consideration.

  One in particular bedeviled him, and had rattled his nocturnal hours, as persistent as a succubus, for many years: the selection of his own bride. Not a single matter was more important to his subjects, for whom there could be no future until he had an heir. Muscular as his arms were from lifting books, and lithe as his fingers were from flipping pages, he was no longer young. He wore the same cerulean robes that he had for as long as folks could remember, but the seasons had crowned him, in his fortieth year, with a silver head of hair.

  His Majesty looked like a sage, a philosopher-king of antiquity, but truly the effect didn’t reach beneath his coif. While he knew he had to marry the most worthy girl in the land, he’d no idea how to calculate who best fit that description. There were so many variables to factor into the equation: lineage, social status, wealth, intelligence, beauty. And to look up in his books any one condition was to discover variables within variables, a tyranny of details. How to evaluate lineage when family trees were brambles of intermarriage? How to assay weal
th when gold held weight only in proportion to the whole economy?

  With each passing year, the king was less confident than he’d been the year before. If anything, that made him a better administrator. He had no prejudices. He made no assumptions. He spoke without inflection. When told of Gimmel, whose second day in the marketplace drew an even rowdier crowd than the first, he showed no personal aversion. With customary resignation, he said that he’d have to consult his books.

  In his thousand hide-bound volumes, the word gambler wasn’t mentioned once. He couldn’t even find a definition for chance. Finally, he asked that Gimmel be brought to his library.

  — Your Majesty wants to play?

  — Tell me, what is it you do for a living?

  The king watched as the gambler rolled two dice across his little table, and then rolled them again. Each time, a different number came up. The king stared, incredulous.

  — Is it a trick?

  — If it were, Your Majesty, they’d always show up the same.

  He invited the king to place a bet. Each would pick a number, and the one whose guess came closer would win the pot. Of course, the monarch had never made a guess in his life, but, after consultation with a couple of books, he reckoned that the highest number was the only one worthy of a sovereign. He bet that the dice would roll twelve. Gimmel, on the other hand, picked the number that brought him the best luck: He put his money, the last penny he had, on seven. The king tossed. The gambler won.

  Was His Majesty upset? Not in the least. In fact, he felt the faint lightness in his head, the slight tingling in his fingers, that occasionally came to him when he stood at the top rung of his ladder, reaching for a book almost out of reach. He ordered another round.

  They played for hours. Gradually, the library filled with the king’s treasure, which he steadily lost to Gimmel. The gambler was especially fortunate that day, right on the money. Just to be fair, he suggested that the king bet on lucky seven, but his majesty preferred consistency. And perhaps he enjoyed losing his fortune, unspent by tradition, centuries’ burden.

  By the next morning, the king’s coffers were empty. He’d gambled away all the crown jewels, every grain of silver and gold. He wanted to wager his books, but he knew they no longer had value. So he grasped Gimmel’s hands.

  — Enjoy my fortune. For what you’ve given me, it’s scarcely compensation.

  Two wagons were brought to haul the treasure away. The king had them hitched with horses from the royal stables. He also offered a rank of guards, but the gambler preferred to take his chances. The monarch nodded, understanding. He held out the horses’ reins to Gimmel. Before the gambler took them, he reached into his tobacco sack. He took out the dice, and handed them to the king.

  His Majesty gazed at the dice, radiant in sunlight. He vowed that the girl he married should have eyes so green. When he looked up again, Gimmel was gone.

  The first frost of winter came fast and hard that year, a month ahead of schedule according to the palace calendar. Folks came to their king in confusion. Nothing like this had happened for as long as anyone could remember. Whole crops faced failure. What should we do? the peasants begged to know.

  After viewing the countryside, His Majesty retreated to his library. He could count at least a dozen volumes that addressed such problems, advising prudence: Crops should be harvested at once, lest all be lost, and supplemented by foreign grain, purchased by the crown. The king looked up at his shelves, then down at his dice on the table. He grasped the gems and threw them, a gamble on the coming weather. They came up lucky seven. He told his subjects not to harvest yet.

  That night, clouds clustered, heavy with snow. Farmers boarded up their barns. But the blizzard didn’t come. Morning brought warm sun. Crops got another week of autumn, then two more. Nobody starved that year.

  Meanwhile, the king found other uses for his dice. In fact, he never consulted his books anymore. He left every decision to chance. Must houses all be white? Must all roads be straight? Must every tree be trimmed to the same height? Not anymore, they didn’t. And if everything could be any which way, why even roll dice in the first place?

  No longer was the king so busy. He could leave his library, stroll from his castle to marketplace or forest. He saw that the consequences of chance in his country weren’t always fortuitous. Leaving the placement of a lookout tower to a coin toss had landed it in deep water, and, after weights and measures were made serendipitous, nothing ever fit right. But in their blowsy garments, the people themselves became less rigid. Imperfection opened whole worlds to them: The underwater lookout tower became an aquarium. No longer beholden to the unalterable authority of history, folks were content to live, with their gambles and their mistakes, in the present. The king observed with approval, and perceived with relief that, for all intents and purposes, he was obsolete.

  He traveled abroad. He saw countries led by tyrants whose uninterrupted rule entailed cauterizing subjects’ tongues at birth, and countries managed by committees that maintained order by conscripting citizens in inconsequential meetings, leaving no time for mischief.

  As a king, he was received everywhere with the respect customary for a visiting head of state, but the monarchs he met were puzzled by his abdication to circumstance. When the servant he brought got homesick, the king sent him back to wife and children. When his slippers wore out, he went barefoot. Gradually, his robes tattered. His beard grew unkempt. Looking less like a sage than a madman, he wandered without direction. He crossed his own path often, yet the landscape seemed to him more foreign with each passage. He saw fields sown with pebbles, irrigation channels running in spirals, houses with dozens of doors yet no windows.

  Then one dusk, seeking a place to rest, he stepped out of the wilderness into a garden of storybook opulence. The ground was quilted with layer upon layer of exotic flowers, while overhead the trees were ornamented by the plumages of a thousand roosting birds. Easing himself into the vegetation, His Majesty slept more easily that evening than he ever had in his own castle.

  At dawn, the king found a girl peering down at him. Her gown appeared to be an outgrowth of the garden, as if she’d been waiting for him there all season while a lily blossomed around her lissome figure. Her auburn hair was pinned up with one variegated feather. Yet it was her emerald eyes that he noticed most: He was sure he’d gazed into them before, in a palace somewhere.

  He told her that he was a king, and asked if she was a princess. She asked if he cared for some breakfast. When he didn’t answer, the girl guided him to a gazebo. In a crystal bowl, she tossed him a salad of white rose petals dressed in fresh dew.

  — Where am I? Who are you? Have I stepped into a fairy tale?

  — There’s no such thing, Your Majesty. Don’t you know? You’re in your own country.

  He scrutinized her more closely. He was sure she wasn’t of the local gentry. Then he realized why her eyes were familiar: They were steeped in the same green as his dice.

  — Will you marry me?

  — What for?

  — That’s what girls do when kings offer.

  — I’m content here by myself.

  — Alone? You might be happier in my palace.

  — I gambled once. It was enough.

  — At least give me a chance?

  — A gamble is only as good as the wager, Your Majesty. With all due respect, your kingdom is a slum. Tend to it. Make me want to leave this retreat.

  As the girl walked away, a bird flew down and plucked the feather from her head. Her hair fell past her shoulders in a peasant’s double braid.

  • • •

  The king had to rouse his sentries from their beds to unbolt his palace gate, as they’d ceased keeping regular hours. What did His Majesty expect, when time had stopped on the royal clock? Nobody knew what day or month it was anymore: Some subjects greeted the king as if they’d seen him moments before, others as if he’d been gone for years. He himself wasn’t sure how long it had been, but he gu
essed he’d been absent quite a while, since nothing was as he recalled. Workshops were abandoned, or used as gambling dens, where, for want of cash, promises were wagered and threats exchanged. All anybody had to eat were wild radishes and blackberries. Uncleared in eons, the forest floor was a resting place for bodies that folks hadn’t bothered to bury, alphabetically or otherwise. And in the palace library the ancient books crumbled as the king’s hands trembled, littering the floor with words arranged by chance. When he knelt down, they didn’t make sense. He couldn’t find a trace that he understood: History couldn’t be recovered. He resolved to take greater care in the future.

  Then he set about trying to fix the present. He implored his subjects to consider what they’d given up to chance, not only in daily housekeeping, but also in sense of purpose.

  Those who could be bothered to put down their dice argued with him. What was the point in living, they demanded, when all possibilities had already been worked out for them, anticipated in books written before they were born? Once he’d granted them free will, they insisted, he couldn’t usurp it.

  Really he couldn’t make them do anything at all. So he returned to his castle, and resumed his post without his subjects. He reviewed laws and made plans. And gradually, seeing him in the palace every day, simply knowing he was there because he’d chosen to be, others began to wonder whether surrendering their lives entirely to games of chance was so freeing.

  One by one, they returned to work. Farmers farmed. Millers milled. Tradesmen began setting up in the marketplace again. Taxes were collected. The palace clock was reset and the calendar recast. Time resumed. But if its form was the same, its function was different: descriptive rather than prescriptive. Folks worked from experience with the seasons, choosing which crops to plant and when, yet rolled with the consequences of their decisions. They learned to gamble wisely, took their chances seriously.

  Busier than ever, helping his subjects see the potential of each new situation they faced, the king staked all he still had on his little province. And so it happened that, one afternoon, while consulting his library on a matter of crop rotation—the books made much more sense when he saw apparently contradictory rules as alternate suggestions—he heard a clamor in the streets as if some unforeseen jackpot had been hit. He mounted a spiral of stairs to the palace observation post. The sentry murmured the word princess and pointed at a lone auburn-haired figure on horseback. She looked up. He dropped to his knees and extended a hand. Her whispered assent, a simple yes, was picked up by the voices of those nearest to her on the road, carried by folks around them, radiating in every direction until it spoke to everyone in the kingdom.