Part: 3/5 read part one
Wordcount: 1,303
Synopsis: Amy encounters the legendary boy-king.
I had been photographing sites for years. I had been to a lot of places and seen a lot of strange things. You’re bound to encounter strange things when you make it your life’s work to pry into the buried chambers of the past. But the voice of a child in the silence startled me because there were no children at the lodge while we were staying there. And I had thought I was alone.
He was standing across the fire from me, gazing levelly through the soft amber light. Once I pulled myself away from the eyes my attention flew to the circlet glimmering on his forehead. My vision adjusted so I could see him more clearly and the impossible became unmistakable. The little king had left his bed.
Strange in retrospect, I didn’t freak out as much as you would think. The first reaction I noticed was a profound sadness that crept up from deep inside me. What did it mean to a child to be undead, uncorrupted, and abandoned in an icy cave on a high mountainside? Poor lonely little boy. Poor forgotten waif. He couldn’t sleep.
Finally, my rationality returned and I shook my head, getting up, turning away with every intention of ignoring the apparition and going back to my room for the night. But as I made my way out of the ring of rustic couches around the roaring fire, I felt someone close behind me and whirled on him.
“Leave me alone,” I snapped.
Tears glowed in his huge dark eyes as he backed away from me. “Are you going to leave too?” he asked in a voice broken with anticipation of the answer.
I shook my head, trying to reply, but my voice didn’t come. I stood frozen in speechless horror as the childish ghoul remained a few paces from me, shivering in the cold, eyes running with ancient tears but continuously gazing up at me. His beautiful face pleaded with me. He wasn’t a deceptive devil of ashes and ice, he was a troubled child. Had he come out before to haunt the mountain climbers and the people who stayed in this lodge? Had anyone ever acknowledged him?
“Go back where you came from. I don’t talk to dead people,” I said, still hoping to awaken myself from this dream.
His breath hitched. “Dead?”
He didn’t know. At that, my resolve crumbled. I reached out for him. “No. I didn’t mean that, honey. Come here.”
He lowered his head, sending flashes of firelight from the stone on his brow, and glanced, uncertain, at my hand. Then he came toward me and I gently pulled him in. His head wasn’t even as high as my chest. I wondered how old he was. The small body was warm and surprisingly solid under the robes he wore, and his hair was thick and soft, but wet with melted snow.
“Did you walk all the way from…?” I didn’t go on. Instead I led him to the couch and invited him to sit beside me in the warmth of the fire. He pulled up his feet, curling into a ball and leaning against me, gazing with still-watery eyes into the dancing flames. “You want to tell me a few things?” I asked.
“What things?”
“I don’t know. Maybe why you can’t sleep?”
He blinked and laid his head on my shoulder. “I don’t like the dreams.”
“What dreams?”
“I dream about my people. They come into the cave and they go away again. They pretend they don’t see me. They act like they don’t know who I am. I miss them. They don’t come anymore.”
They’re dead! All his people are dead. How long has it been? How long has he been dreaming of them coming to his grave to mourn him as dead? But I didn’t ask him. Instead I asked him what any good archeologist would have asked. “What were your people like?”
He was quiet for a moment. “They made flutes from bones and played beautiful music. They were strong and built houses in the sides of the mountain and walls along the crests of the hills. They tamed the sheep and horses and planted banks of poppies just for the joy of seeing them bloom.
“And they wanted a king. They choose me to lead them. Everyone was pleased with me, and everyone knew my voice in a crowd. They loved to hear me laugh and would come and stay with me for hours just to listen to the things I told them.
“But after a while, they seemed unhappy. They stopped talking to me and talked only to each other. The men started talking about other places, and how their leaders were different. And they decided they didn’t want me to lead them anymore.”
He fell quiet and I sat thinking, trying to imagine the thriving civilization that must have been on this saddleback thousands of years ago. The poppies, the music, the horses—it was all gone now. Nothing remained but drifted snow, and the buried ruins in the mountainside. But why?
“Well,” I said at last. “Maybe they thought it would be better to have a leader who wasn’t a child.”
“I’m not a child.”
And that was when I realized he wasn’t.
He wrapped his arms around his knees and scowled at the fire. “But that was one of the things they said. They wanted a man to rule them. They wanted a king who would be wise and mighty. But years passed—many years, and I never became what they wanted. Other places they had seen had men leading them with war machines and gold and concubines. Other places they had seen had many kings in the time when they only had one. But what they wanted more than anything else was a king they could put in the ground and venerate as a man gone away. They wanted to have a treasury of dead kings. Like the other places.”
I couldn’t process all he was saying. But I kept gathering it like my files of photographs. I could analyze it later. “So, what did they do?”
For a long time, he didn’t answer. The wind moaned around the lodge and sang like a ghost in the chimney. Finally, he drew a small sobbing breath. “They put me in the cave and they told me I was dead.”
“They made you stay in the cave?”
He nodded. He rubbed his wrist across his eyes and ducked his head, unable to go on for a while. Then he took a deep breath. “They came now and then. They burned herbs and resin and carved things on the walls, but they didn’t talk to me. They didn’t even look at me. And they never stayed for very long. Sometimes they would leave me things. Bone flutes and copper bells and jars full of flowers—pretty things. But I really just wanted them to stay.” Then he looked up at me. “Are you going to leave too?”
I smoothed my hand through his long wavy hair and wrapped my arm around him. He settled against my shoulder again. “Not tonight,” I said.
So, they had always had a boy king. The same king for years—decades? Centuries? How long had he lingered in the form of a child, leading the people in the saddleback of Mt. X? How long did it take for them to become discontented with him, in his staunch unwillingness to change, to age, to die, to decay like the other kings they had seen? When had they abandoned him in the cave and when had the last of his people come to pay homage at his tomb? I didn’t ask him. He was tired. I let him sleep.