The King lies dying. Night after night, awake in his bed at an unholy hour, he feels his life leaking out of his body, gathering in limp black pools in the pits of his history, like the sweat that congeals between his back and the bedsheets. Unseen above him the stars stagger ’round the sky in their eternal intermiable whirl and he can feel their funereal procession ticking off the dwindling moments until the Sun rises and wearily cuts one more futile notch in the log of his days.
The King lies dying. He can feel it in his bones, has felt it for many months now, though all his counselors and privvy lords assure him he has never looked more the picture of health, the very paragon of vitality. He listens and nods at matters of state but his arms hang leadenly at his sides and the crown, he knows beyond faith, would — given a moment’s chance — snap his neck should he let it dip down at all. It is all he can do, each day, to rise and sit and stand and shuffle wearily through the rooms of his court, until he can find a moment’s grace in simply sinking wearily into his fresh-turned linen sheets, where he listens to the stars spin their nightly waltz that would be a mockery of him, if he were in their thoughts at all.
How did it come to this? He can still hear the echo of the triumphal horns trumpeting his entry to the city, the cheering multitudes lining his path with roses. He can still remember being hailed as a hero, greeted as a gentle conqueror. He can still taste on his tongue the heady wine that flowed, buoying his visions of the bright future. Life had been hard in the land of that time, it was true, but now his steadying hand would still the rudder and carry them all safe through the raging storm. Times would be good again.
How did it come to this? Times had been good, he had made them so, and the land had prospered under his hand. From the cruelest depths he had led them to undreamt heights, from darkest night into the bright sunlight. He had strode magnificently at the head. Now he could barely shuffle from one room to the next. He suffered and the land suffered. He could no longer distinguish between his anguish and its, no longer tell whether his illness caused the land’s distress, or it his. They were one and the same, a long drawn-out sigh of weariness and regret.
He faces the end alone. Oh, even now he is thronged by courtiers and supplicants, transparent well-wishers who drink his health but savor his deterioration. Some have been with him since the earlier, brighter days, from even before his exile and miraculous return. They watch him decay now and in their eyes he sees — he hopes he sees — sorrow and pity, flickering remembrances of greater times. Others of his lords he inherited upon his return. Though they have served him mostly well, always there has been the thread of anger. Displaced by his ascendancy, they watch now with a barely-buried glint of glee, impatiently waiting for the conclusion of his long long fall. Finally in his court are those he has drawn there himself, attracted from abroad, raised up from the commonhood — some, even, the now-grown children who had paved his path with petals.
He faces the end alone. Everyone does, he supposes. But not everyone dies alone suffocated by a cloud of courtiers bearing false concern, false hope, false faith. The coterie surrounds him at every lit moment, none wanting to be with him as the end comes, none daring to be away when it does. Though they do not ken it, he sees them sharpening their knives — not for him, hardly worth the effort in his decline, but for each other. He is going, and when he is gone the storm will break over the land more fiercely than ever. Yet all secretly, in their hearts, wish him over and gone soonest, now, even himself.
He has carried them so far and can no further. He breathes heavily and knows that it is time to give up breath, to exhale his spirit where it can mingle with stones and brook and history, to be buried and become one again with the land and so begin to heal it. His sun has set and another must arise, to usher in a new dawn and a new hope — the light of a day his eyes cannot see. He knows this.
He has carried them so far and can no further. Yet he seems at the last unready to lay down the burden. He draws breath and knows that he cannot yet cease, that a lifetime of doing has rendered him unable to halt. Some part of him still clings to the world. He wishes it were otherwise, prays so even, but in the deepest part of his heart — the same part that knows it is time — he knows he cannot let go, not yet. He will hang here a while more, caught between the dusk and the dawn, and the land hangs with him, suspended awaiting a rebirth of possibilities, after the death of hope.
The King lies dying.
His band was excellent, including as always the amazing Shane Fontayne on guitar. I found the playlist interesting, as there were some rarer bits (“My Santuary”, for example) and some missing favorites (such as my personal one, “Dig Down Deep”). He played surprisingly few from what he jokingly calls his “Greatest Hits album, released first”.