Crown of Keys
I’ve lost track of the days I did stuff and forgot to upload, bah, so I’m just going to jump back in and not worry about that.
Once the water-seller saw a little boy at the fountain. It was the summer and the fountain was dry as bones, yet the boy was despondently pushing a little paper boat across the bottom of its pool.
So she tied up her dappled mare and sat down beside him. “You won’t sail very far on an ocean with no water.”
He looked up at her. “I wish it would rain.”
She giggled. “So do I, but let me tell you a story—it’s a secret! Don’t tell anyone else.” He nodded and leaned his head on her shoulder to listen.
‘Once there was a king in a kingdom with no candles. He wore a crown of keys and he’d lived for years without counting with his bright-voiced queen, who never stopped talking to him and whose words were so beautiful and wise they turned into light, cutting gracefully through the gloom. Together they ruled that kingdom with strength, courage, and enough foresight to at least guarantee a peaceful and prosperous reign for their heirs—they had seven sons and seven daughters—and if their heirs had learnt their lessons skilfully, maybe for their heirs as well.
But it was not meant to be, for one day the wazir came to the king and said, “I have read it in a book that the crown of keys is a key to human hearts; if you show someone the right key, then a lock will appear, and he who puts the key in that lock will have the love of that heart forever.”
The king immediately pulled a key from his crown, and by some inspiration, it was the key to the wazir, and he locked his heart then and there. There was a mountain-shattering sound. Then the wazir understood the import of what he had done and begged the king to lock no more hearts, to leave love well enough alone, but the king saw the look in the wazir’s eyes and the desperate fear in his face and he craved to see it again and again.
The king began to keep the crown in his lap when he held audiences, and he would quietly lock the hearts of those that came to see him, until all his family and staff and dukes and earls, emirs and khagans, beys and knights and nomad chiefs, most of the people of his kingdom, loved no one better than he, and he was always surrounded by the radiance of their desire.
But there was one key he could never find.
He could not find the key of the queen, and as the years unfurled, she began speaking less and less, and her song no longer illuminated the vaulted halls.
One day he asked her about it.
She replied, “Didn’t you have my whole heart, before? In its season, when it bloomed, wasn’t it beautiful?” ‘
The water-seller stopped there. “There’s an end to that story, but I think today is not the time to tell it.”
The boy nodded. “Can we go riding on your horse? I should like to see the other side of that dune there, and when we get there, we can see the other side of whatever is behind it.”
Last 5 posts by willows
- Some stuff I made recently - February 26th, 2008
- Queen of Cups: The Water-Seller - February 11th, 2008
- Catching Up - February 9th, 2008
- After Amano - February 9th, 2008
- Another water-seller sketch - February 8th, 2008