The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six by Jonathon Keats Read Free Book Online Page B

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