NUMBERS
Later, a historian, striving for the appearance
of candor, said he couldn't determine precisely
how many people the demon burnt in their towns,
but that, by using the most meticulous methods,
he estimated between 16,020 and 16,150 perished
thus.
Seeking the authority of precision, the historian
next stated that 18,272 men, 16,164 women,
and 4,769 children followed the demon to his
island fortress and there served him in dubious
ways.
When the demon died,
fewer than two thousand
of his servants remained alive
within his fortress.
He had not hoarded his human treasure,
but spent it, singly or by the dozen,
setting servants aflame
in the dining hall.
Fewer than two thousand left
when King Xau came,
yet still the number
seemed overwhelming --
people lay collapsed in chambers,
passages, stairwells;
inert, parched, many injured,
all dying of thirst.
The same historian, a soured and stunted specimen,
dismissed King Xau's part in a peevish paragraph. He
said that doubtless the king visited the fortress,
but that the king himself saved no one, merely
ordered his soldiers to wake the dazed sufferers.
The king's guards tried
to rouse the survivors;
the sailors who had brought
the king to the island tried:
they could not rouse
one man, woman, child.
Instead they wet the sufferers' lips
(most swallowed, some did not),
and took them to the king --
who did not look kingly
(a fact the historian would have reported
gleefully had he guessed it).
Xau slouched, slovenly, sweat-soaked
over body after body;
his hands on chest, face, neck;
speaking, whispering, croaking.
Five died before the king
had time to help them.
Thirteen more (injured, weak)
woke, but died within days.
A few of the survivors
achieved distinction:
the glassblower from Angshan
rose to the head of his guild;
the china bowls made by one
female potter were hailed
(over a century later)
as the greatest of their age;
thirty-two men enlisted in the army,
of whom one became a captain of note.
Most returned, their names unrecorded
by history, to ordinary lives.
Curiously, when they remembered
the king kneeling over them,
each recalled a heroic figure:
young, handsome, clean, richly dressed.
Many described him as crowned,
the crowns as various as the speakers --
plain or jeweled, arched or unarched,
gold or silver or iron.
Only the guard who carried the king
back to the ship accurately remembered
the man in his arms: smelly, shaking,
stammering, crownless but a king.
(First published in Star*Line)
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