The Giant's Almanac Andrew Zurcher (books to read fiction TXT) 📖

to the market, and laid my stall out cunningly as before, so that by the time the market closed there was not a single item left upon my tables. My friend the merchant of that city happened to be passing at that hour, and laughed to see my stall again so empty.

‘“Brother merchant,” he said, “again I find that you have given away your worldly goods, so that you have not a scrap of silk to your name! It is a great sadness to me, each day to find how trading has driven you to beggary!”

‘I laughed at his jest, remembering how he had invited me the evening before to his house, and fed me, and given me drink. But on this day he did not invite me to his house; instead he said, “After you have returned to your inn, and eaten your evening meal, meet me at the gates of the city, for there is something in the desert that I would like to show you.”

‘I did as he invited me to do, and before an hour had passed I met him again at the gates of the city. Beyond the gates there was a waste place that stretched for many miles in every direction – dry, dangerous and deserted. In the early morning, just as the sun was rising, many people set out from the gates on the road, for it was possible to reach the next city on foot in only a few hours; but in the evening the road was empty, and as we set out through the gates, we were alone.

‘We circled round the walls until we came to a place where the ruins of an old well stood. Here the merchant told me to sit, for in this place he would continue his story from the night before. He said I would understand later why he had asked me to come to this place.

‘“Brother merchant,” he said, “I told you yesterday how the king of kings looked in vain for his heir, the beggar boy, but I did not tell you what happened to the boy. Behind his disappearance lies another story. The king of kings, who was an accomplished soldier, was not a scholar. When he left his city to go on campaign each summer, in his place as ruler he left his chief counsellor – his wazir, who was also his brother. Now the king’s brother was wise and knowledgeable, but like his brother he was ambitious. From year to year in the king’s absence, he developed a taste for the power that was vested in him, and he conceived a great desire to be king in his brother’s place. Understanding that his brother was returning from campaign with an inestimable hoard of treasure, he saw his opportunity; when he sent emissaries to his brother’s vassals, commanding them to assemble at the Feast of the Thousand Kings in order to crown his brother king of kings, he found a way to insinuate in their minds a conspiracy to murder his brother and put himself in his place; however, he did this so cunningly that each of these princes believed the conspiracy to be his own design, or a plot hatched by one of his confederates. Thus it was that, when the conspiracy was discovered, no man spoke against the wazir.

‘“And yet the king’s brother was bitterly disappointed, and very angry. He exercised his fury by arresting the beggar boy and torturing him, before shaving his head and sending him into the desert as a lackey to the king’s slaves, who had been commanded – as I have told you – to construct the king’s tomb. For the wazir had convinced the boy that his information, though it had saved the king’s life, had caused him an incurable sadness, for among the thousand vassals whom the king had enslaved, many were men of his family, the close companions of his youth and his dear friends. So it was that, bound to the slave gang, collar to collar, the boy trudged into the desert, dejected, cast out and surrounded by enemies.

‘“For months the boy toiled with the other slaves to build a sumptuous tomb fit for a shāhanshāh. The king’s prisons had been emptied to furnish architects, masons and artists, and these were the celebrated men of the slave camp that sprang up in the desert; to them was given the choice of tents, with the best of the food. To the kings now made slaves, little was offered, but from them much was demanded: hard toil in the hot sun with little water, digging, hauling, lifting without end. All the precedence of former days was quickly forgotten, and among these slaves he was most celebrated who could lift the most or dig the deepest. In this company, the boy was almost lost: scrawny and stunted after a life of poverty, his child frame was no use in a test of strength and endurance. He was fortunate each night if for his supper he was grudged the grease in the pan, and to shield him from the wind and the cold they offered him the largest tent of all – the vault of the night’s open sky. These hardships the boy tolerated with fortitude, for he remembered the great sadness into which he had cast the king of kings, and he was abashed.

‘“But it was not long before the slaves of the camp found a use for the boy. Their camp in the desert was secret, the site of their underground tomb hidden from the world; the king had forbidden travellers to enter the desert, but it was often necessary for the architects and masons, for the smiths and even for the labourers, to make journeys from the camp into the city, or to the quarries, or into the mountains to hunt or trade. What was to stop these men from revealing the site of the king’s tomb, and trading the knowledge of