Like ripe grain the days fell before the relentlessly swinging scythe of time, seemingly in bunches, but actually one by one, the hours, minutes, and seconds clinging like fat seeds to the head of each golden stalk. The harvested days were bundled together into weeks, and the sheaves were leaned together as months, until entire years stood stacked and yellowing in a regular pattern that receded into the distance and out of sight across the rolling countryside.

And the harvests were good in the kingdom of Nod, year after year. A sweet, bloated peace settled like a sigh upon the land. An entire generation of children, born of corpulent store clerks and fat-bellied farmers, knew nothing of the scourge of hunger nor the paralyzing threat of foreign invasion. They seemed to have been sired by a race of giants who possessed an unlimited capacity to provide and protect. These same farmers and merchants, themselves little educated, found the time and the money now to send a favorite son or daughter off for a year or two of schooling, and the University of Nod flourished. Church pews throughout the realm were packed each Sabbath with content, comfortable, and thankful citizens.

Outside the borders to the south and east, ragged hordes of moral dwarfs robbed, raped, pillaged, murdered, and performed infamous crimes against nature in an endless orgy of wickedness and evil. But no one in Nod cared any longer, for none of the barbarians dared to set foot within the kingdom, so awesome had the tales of the Sorcerer's terrible powers grown with the passing years.

The Sorcerer himself was seldom seen. Occasional reported sightings were doubtless apocryphal, inventions of the overtaxed imagination of a bookkeeper or the conjurings of a wistful fisherman's fancy. But signs of his presence were well known. Mysterious bursts of colored fire could be seen from time to time glowing just above the magician's mountain home, amidst monstrous rumblings that seemed to shake the earth's very core. These ominous reminders made as strong an impression upon the local populace as it did upon their foreign enemies. For the rascal with a penchant for criminal enterprise, a mere whisper of the wizard's terrible justice straightened a potentially crooked path. Mothers warned a wayward lad or lass to behave lest the Protector of the Kingdom discover the mischief and exact an unkind retribution. A fulsome variety of painful and embarrassing indignities, from spilt milk and moth holes to acid indigestion and hemorrhoids, were quietly attributed to the Sorcerer's mysterious powers and purposes.

Thanks to the Protector of the Kingdom, the army was no longer needed for the awkward and distasteful task of national defense. Public funds were channeled away from the militia. Occasionally the King would still review the troops, for form's sake, but in order to fill the small parade grounds, aging veterans would have to be called out of retirement to supplement the dwindling ranks. The once merely small army slowly deteriorated into an inept honor society for toothless old generals and assorted societal misfits. Its sole remaining role was to amuse the King and garnish his royal extravaganzas.

The King's reign was as unlike his father's as night is from day. He had revered, admired, loved, and secretly hated his father, never once suspecting that they were both driven by the same neurotic insecurity. The Old King had plunged into activity, leading military campaigns, endlessly touring the kingdom, overseeing public works projects, supervising local government, and maintaining political support with the ruthless determination of a desperado. The King avoided life as best he could. Nothing frightened him more than the unexpected, the little vicissitudes of life, the trials and tribulations which might spring up unannounced and reveal to all the world his fundamental inadequacy as a king and as a human being. In truth, he was inept at everything, because he had never in his life attempted anything.

Life had offered the King a single chance to blossom, and then had pruned it away again just as his spirit was beginning to bud. Three years before his death, the King's father had confronted his own mortality, concluded that lineal descendants might help matters, and arranged a marriage for his son with the beautiful young daughter of a rich silk merchant. Though she was fifteen years the King's junior, she possessed a genius for drawing the King out, building his confidence, and interesting him in the marvelous little activities of ordinary life. For more than a year life had been sweeter than he had ever dared to hope. On the evening the Prince was born, the King was the proudest man on the face of the earth. He tenderly kissed his beloved bride as she drifted off into a well-deserved sleep, a sleep from which she never awoke. She quietly died of internal hemorrhaging that night.

The King never trusted life again.

Yet it would be inaccurate to say he was unhappy as the years passed him by. The royal coffers were filled to overflowing from the exorbitant taxes on every possible human endeavor which the Old King had established when times were lean. Abundance mushroomed within the realm. The King could hardly spend money fast enough to keep up. He had long ago turned over the mundane details of running the kingdom to ministers he seldom saw, and comfort had totally extinguished any spark of ingenuity which may once have smouldered in the backwoods of his otherwise mediocre mind. He spent his time devising ever more elaborate, pompous, and expensive rituals for his daily court procedures, gathering his cronies about him like trained pigeons in splendid and absurd costumes, and buffering himself from the unanticipated. Those ceremonies which amused him, he repeated over and over again, until some of the younger attendants would grow embarrassed and look away, whispering that the King and his Chief Advisor were like two peas in a pod.

In sad fact, the passing years had not been kind to Grimm. He had grown quite senile, often confusing the King with his father whom he had served years ago, and mistaking the fuzzy past with the even fuzzier present. It was rumored that he suffered the insane delusion that God was whispering important messages into his left ear. Occasionally he would be visited with a brief flash of lucidity, though they seemed to come with decreasing frequency, as if the old man fought them off, preferring instead to swim in the murky waters of muddled thinking. Perhaps in those rare and cruel instants of clarity the once-brilliant Chief Advisor had no choice but to face what he had become: a broke-down, drooling, humorless, smelly, white-haired, irrelevant old scutter.

Yet the King kept him on. Grimm would spend most of the day snoring quietly, asleep in the low chair reserved for him just below the King's right elbow, his tousled hair and bushy eyebrows white as freshly fallen snow upon the heap of his shrunken skin, so loose and shriveled that it seemed to have been torn off and abandoned by a disgruntled grizzly bear. Some said the King put up with him out of the goodness of his royal heart, as a gesture to all the old, the poor, the demented, the sick, and the halt, or at least for the sake of appearance, in deference to the venerable citizens of the realm who could recall Grimm's proud counsel when the Old King had been helmsman of the sea-tossed ship of state. Others suggested that the King himself was a little soft in the mind, and Grimm was the only member of his cabinet who spoke the same language.

In all the inner circles of the royal administration, the only unflickering flame seemed to be the young Prince as he grew older and ever bolder. More and more the King would rely upon his son to supervise at functions and preside at ceremonies, at first only in the remote outlands of the realm, but later whenever sovereign representation was called for outside the four walls of the castle. The King simply would not be bothered to travel abroad. The subjects came to know the Prince better than they did the King. The Prince became a symbol for the new enlightened self-sufficiency the kingdom now enjoyed. With the Prince as heir apparent to the throne, peace, prosperity, and a gentle rule of reason seemed assured for generations to come.

The Prince was the darling of the realm, and the citizens seemed unable to get enough of him. Young apprentices and clerks, without exception polite and pleasant fellows, if a little dull, would have sold their own parents into slavery to possess the spark of vivacity that flashed from his pale green eyes and sizzled within the words he spoke. Female hearts would go a-pitter-patter whenever the auburn-haired Prince appeared in public to cut the ribbon for a new irrigation dam, officially initiate a diversion canal, or dedicate a freshly completed monument to the living memory of the King. Many a housewife wept silently just to watch him ride past astride his chestnut stallion, shoulders thrown back, head held proudly, in command of a crack honor guard of haughty young horsemen.

Within the castle, downy daughters of staid and stuffy statesmen would catch the Prince's hand as they passed in the narrow mustiness of the royal cloakroom and whisper to him of a midnight tryst. And, indeed, the Prince was no stranger to matters of venereal delight, though no lovely lass had yet snared his fancy for longer than a momentary indiscretion. Except for his dreams, alas, true love itself had not so much as left him its calling card.

The Prince was a product of his age of plenty, representative of his generation, only somehow more so, as if his typical landscape had been painted in vivid colors by a more passionate hand. As a boy, he had been given everything his little heart desired, every new game, toy, pastime, or diversion the empire had to offer. In school he rose to the ninety-seventh percentile of his class overall. Later he took to competitive sports with an intensity that delighted his coaches and staggered his opponents. He seemed to have everything a young prince could possibly want.

One would suppose the Prince happy. But inside he was ravaged by unquenchable desires. Though he did very, very well at everything he attempted, he never quite managed to become the absolute best at anything. He raged after the elusive goal of perfection and resented those who finished ahead of him. A bitter discontent grew within him like a fetus, conceived of a ravenous curiosity, nurtured by unruly emotions, and aching to be born. Try though he might, it would not be aborted.

One day shortly after his eighteenth birthday, the Prince sought an audience with the King, who had just completed Royal Decrees and was about to begin Imperial Proclamations. Several attendants stood by in chartreuse leotards with epaulets of flocked juniper branches, and Grimm was snoozing in the Chief Advisor's chair. "Father," he said, "I am not happy."

"Oh, that doth sorrow us greatly." More and more of late the King tended to lapse into the regal first person plural even with his son. "Perhaps you would like a new jumping horse or a deerhide shuttleball." He gracefully raised his jeweled arm to summon the royal purser to count out enough money for the suggested purchases.

"No," the Prince interrupted. "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all."

The King lowered his arm, leaned closer, and squinted suspiciously, as if seeing his son for the first time in years. Where he had expected to find an angular, awkward, unkempt young rascal, a handsome prince now stood. "My, my, but you've grown, my boy. What seems to be the problem?"

"I'm being smothered, father, by all the sports and games and toys and schooling and endless imperial proceedings." The Prince's voice was full of emotion. "They're all distractions, and nothing more. It's all too comfortable, too predictable, and the distractions and the comfort keep me from reaching the truth."

The Prince now had his father's undivided attention. The King fidgeted uncomfortably. "But what are you looking for, my boy?"

"Well . . . truth. You know. I feel an emptiness inside. I hunger for knowledge of the true nature of things. Why, for example, am I here? What's my purpose?"

"Why to be king after me!" the King proclaimed proudly, pounding the back of the Chief Advisor's chair for emphasis.

Grimm straightened up, rubbed his eyes, and yawned.

"But why are there kings at all, father? I want to be absolutely certain that life on earth serves some purpose, because until I know that for certain, I will be discontented." The Prince searched his father's eyes for a glimmer of understanding. "Why, father, is there anything at all and not rather nothing?"

Jarred momentarily from its usual thought processes, the sovereign mind attempted to wrestle with the unfamiliar. "Ah, ah, ah," was all the King could manage to answer as he pondered the larger question. His eyes darted about for help.

"What does he want?" Grimm wanted to know, his voice shrill from paranoia. Having just awakened, he was a bit more muddled than usual. "What's he asking?"

"He wants to know the purpose of life," the King shouted irritably, as if sheer volume would render his words easier to comprehend. "Do you know what it is?"

Grimm rubbed his hoary pate with one hand and fumbled with his wizened genitals with the other. "Is it a trick?" he responded, much too loudly.

"Go back to sleep," the King snapped. "We'll take care of this."

"Might I suggest," whispered the nearest of the festooned attendants, perceiving the King's distress and trying to fill the void left by the Chief Advisor's incompetence, "that you could perhaps send him to the learned Professor Thatch."

"Of course!" cried the King, enormously relieved. "We shall send you to the learned Professor Thatch, my boy! He's head of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Truth at the University of Nod. Perhaps you know of him? He'll certainly be able to help you."

"Thank you, father," said the Prince, bowing formally and retiring in the proper manner. With excitement and anticipation he put his affairs in order and packed for the journey to Enoch, where the University of Nod was located. He put aside the things of his youth and prepared himself, as best he could, for initiation into the world of higher learning.