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

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