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Come, Dagonet! Show us how the king looks when he wakes too early!
Ah, gentlemen, methinks the king has drunk enough to wake late for a fortnight.
Come, Dagonet! Tell us a tale, anything, anything! The night is dark, the wine is done.
One tale, then. A fool must earn his penny.
Once, gentle lords, and you ladies with your hair in one thousand knots! Once, there was a poor tile-maker, and his hands were red from the dust of terra cotta, from the dust of all those roof-tiles you see along the road, glittering on wattle houses like a fine scarlet cap! This tile-maker wandered across patches of land like the patches on my own cloak, scouring the earth for bits of bone and feather, stone and glass and seeds like hard little jewels, leaves and hide and fine, sifted soil, husks and bark and jewels like hard little seeds. With these motley things he made mosaics that caught the breath of any who saw them and spun that breath into a shower of golden stars. He laid out the crystalline zodiac on floors and ceilings, with planets of bone and gem-scattered orbital tracks creeping across the rafters.
But it was not often that he could truly ply his art, for such things are expensive, as well you know, my lords. More often the noonday sun found him hammering one red tile to another on the roof of a tavern, swatting at bees that thrummed anxiously around his head. And so the man went in his way until a certain palace spat out its foundations on a certain stretch of green sward, and certain men inhabited it as surely as a honeycomb, thrumming anxiously in their way. These men called upon the tile-maker and begged him to create for them such a floor that any who stepped upon it would be possessed totally by its vision, and compelled by its beauty to love and serve those who owned it.
The tile-maker considered this for a long while. His little hut was certainly filled with enough bones and stones and skins and powders, paints and feathers and dyes to make such a floor. But he felt that he needed some last thing that he could not quite name, and so this tile-maker whose hair was no less dusty than it had been, went out into the countryside to find the center-tile of his magnificent floor, a floor while had already begun to lay itself out on the bare boards of his heart.
Are you tired already of my tale, gentlemen? You would rather I skip ahead? You do not want to hear of the bridge which spans our fair land and the golden land of the west, where all strange-liveried knights find their origin? You are bored by the nature of floor-making, and desire to hear no more of how the poor tile-maker crossed even into those golden lands to find the sweet, pale bone of a woman drowned for her love, with which to bind the center-tile? Very well—all things for my audience.
The man was ragged as a hare wolf-chased for a month when he returned over that bridge I shall tell you not of, and in his hands he clutched a long white bone, and with brown-beaten hands, boiled this bone with quicksilver in a copper pot until it was passing strange: a lacquer which shone like the very veil of death. He poured this into the core of a milk-stone star he had set in the deep blue floor, and began his work.
And well do you know, my lords, the shape of this floor: how it shows the stars in their spheres and the vines and scarlet flowers of welltilled earth, how it shows Virgo and Taurus and Pisces—glittering virgins astride bulls and fish snapping at the edges of the known world! Well do you know how many fruits and crops twine its borders in green, how many oranges and pomegranates and grapes jewel its corners, how many showers of sweet rain speckled in pebbles and feather-cartilage water how many fields of silver wheat. How many flowers, how many endless flowers, tangle through the stars and the virgins and the wheat, how many peonies and lilies and snowdrops, and yes, roses, and yes, crocuses.
Well do you know, my lords, for you walk upon it.
The tile-maker finished the great work of his life, which was no more than what the men who thrummed like bees would track mud and grass and blood over for a decade or two, and was paid as well as he hoped, retiring to his hut and living happily, if we should wish to imagine him happy, and miserably, should we choose to imagine him miserable—this is only a story, my lords and my ever-dewdrop’t ladies, and we may end it as we please.
But one more moment, I beg you, and your Dagonet will be silent as a floor in shadow.
For one evening the floor did lie in shadow—shadow pure as our queen!—and all who looked upon it, and loved, and served, had gone to their slumber or sport. It so happened on this night of all nights that the roof allowed the smallest creep of rainwater through its most noble thatch, and that drop of rain—sweet rain, sweet as golden land beneath a bridge, sweet as a maid long drowned, sweet as the sea that drowned her—fell, perfect and clear, onto that bone-lacquered star-core which the poor tile-maker had traveled so far and through such trials to find.
And what do you think happened? My lords, you will never guess it. It was I sprang from this tile, whole and entire, for there never was a fool who had any land or title, birth or name or worth beyond the grand floor on which he performs, the floor which bears him up while he makes himself ridiculous, makes himself wretched, while he loves, while he serves. The floor is all he is.
Tan-dara-dara-dei.
III.
There my love made a place to lie
and was it strewn with flowers?
Yes, with violets
and bluebells
and lilies pale as hours.
Tan-dara-dara-dei.
There I made my love to lie
and did I love her well?
Yes, with roses
and tulip leaves
and a bird’s song like a bell.
Tan-dara-dei.
My lady sprang, too, from that floor—for what can a fool’s lady have but the estate of her dearest? And her skirt was all a-snarl with daffodils, and roses red as mouths. We cared nothing, between us, but strode our floor back and forth like lord and lady, measuring and chronicling its every tile. I clutched her roses; she clutched my cap.
