It had happened that way every year for more dozens of years than anyone can remember: we expected it and were resigned to it. The longhouses and the roundhouses were filled, the meadows were filled, the sacred groves were filled. Some people even slept in trees. “Have you ever seen so many people?” we all kept asking each other, though of course we had, only the year before. But it was the thing to say.

We even had a few of the King’s men in town to see the ceremony. They were swaggering thick-bodied men who wore robes of red and green, and they went striding through the crowds as if there was no one in their way. People stepped aside when they passed. I asked my mother’s brother Urillin, who had raised me in my father’s absence, who they were, and he said, “They are the King’s men, boy. They sometimes come here for the Festival, to enjoy themselves at our expense.” And he muttered a bitter curse, which surprised me, because Urillin was a mild and quiet man.

I stared at them the way I might have stared at men with two heads, or six arms. I had never seen King’s men before; and, in fact, I have never seen them since. Everyone knows that there is a King somewhere on the other side of Kosa Saag who lives in a grand palace in a great city and holds dominion over many villages, ours among them. The King owns the magic that makes everything work, and so I suppose we are dependent on him. But he is so very far away and his decrees have so little direct bearing on our everyday life that he might just as well live on some other planet. We dutifully pay our tribute but otherwise we have no dealings with him or the government he heads. He is only a phantom to us. I scarcely thought about him from one end of the year to the other. But the sight of these men of his service, who had come such a great distance to attend our Festival, reminded me how huge the world is, and how little I knew about any of it except our own village lying in the shadow of the Wall; and so the King’s men awakened awe in me as they went strutting by.