Now it is night again and I will get on with what I’ve started:
Bostanji did not have a plan for what to do
next, which might be the very best kind of plan, if you think about it. No one
else can possibly know what one’s plan is if there’s not a plan to be known.
That’s what I say, and frequently.
And truly, if it was for many months that
Bostanji walked across the desert – bagful of jewels slung cripplingly over his
shoulder – then the time and the distance were owing only to his own forgetting
to stop.
At some point, he climbed a convenient tower.
He wished to count his stolen gems.
There were many.
He would have counted them all, too, but no
sooner had he begun than he heard a sound in the distance. Bostanji looked out
from the tower to see, far off in the moonlight, a glint from the swords of the
Sultan’s soldiers coming straight for him.
Remember that he didn’t have a plan.
The soldiers cared not one whit about this
lack of a plan, and they marched into the tower and then on up the stairs. In
what might be described – and not at all inaccurately – as a fit of
desperation, Bostanji took the gems, the sapphires and the rubies, the emeralds
and the pietercites, the atracites and chrysocollas, and even those democracites
and bobstones, and he flung them out of the tower through a window.
They hung there.
In the sky.
Twinkling.
I’m told this is how stars came to be.
Bostanji pretended to be fast asleep, for this was
another of his many talents, so that upon reaching the top of the tower, the
soldiers searched and searched and found nothing but a seemingly sleeping Bostanji.
They dragged him back to the palace.
When I say that I do not know what happened
to Bostanji after that, I say it while being very well able to imagine it.
Anyway, this is where I came into the story.
Please don’t get ahead of me here.
Morning dawns and so for now, I break off
from what I’ve been allowed to say. My story will be continued later…
The Jewels of Naz:
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