I. The King Who Could Not Sleep Without Stories

In the time when the Tuatha Dé Danann still held the sovereignty of Ireland — before the Gaels came over the sea and drove them underground into the hollow hills — there reigned in Leinster a king whose passion for stories was the organising principle of his life. He ate well and drank moderately and judged his people fairly, but what he truly needed, with a need that bordered on physical necessity, was to hear a new story every night of his life before he could close his eyes and sleep.

For this purpose he maintained, at considerable expense, a file — a hereditary poet-storyteller — who held a large estate from the king’s hand on the single condition that he would supply, night after night, a new story, never repeated, always fresh. The estate was rich. The file lived well. For many years the arrangement was a model of the social contract between a lord and his artistic retainer, and both parties were satisfied.

The file’s difficulty was one that no one had thought to address when the contract was written: stories, even in Ireland, are not infinite. Over the years the file worked through the great cycles of tale — the stories of the Tuatha Dé Danann themselves, the cattle-raid tales, the tales of shape-shifting and love and war and loss, the tales from over the sea, the tales within tales — until he reached a point he had never anticipated and never admitted: he had used them all. He came to the king’s chamber one night with nothing.

II. The Empty-Handed Storyteller

A file who comes empty-handed to his king is in the position of a physician who cannot cure, a judge who cannot rule, a bard who cannot sing: he has failed in the one thing his station requires him not to fail in. The king of Leinster was a patient man, but he was not an infinitely patient man, and he made it clear to the storyteller that a replacement would be found unless, by the following night, a new tale was presented.

The file left the palace and went out into Ireland to look for a story. He was a professional; he knew where stories lived. He went to the hills and the fords and the ancient ruins. He went to the houses of other poets and the cells of holy men and the halls of provincial lords. He collected fragments, partial tales, rumours of marvels. But each time he tried to weave them into something new, he found they had already, somewhere in his long career, been told.

“Níl aon tine gan toit, agus níl aon scéal gan bréag.”

“There is no fire without smoke, and there is no story without a lie.”

— Irish proverb on the nature of storytelling, Munster oral tradition

It was while he was travelling in this despairing condition that he encountered, on a lonely road, a woman driving a flock of sheep. She was old and capable-looking, and she had with her a stick and a dog, and she was moving the sheep along the road with the unhurried competence of someone who has been doing this her whole life. They got into conversation, as travellers do. She asked what he was looking for. He told her: a story he had never told before. She considered this for a moment. “Come and help me get these sheep home,” she said. “I may have something for you.”

III. The Tale Within the Journey

The woman’s house was further than it had looked, and the road to it was stranger, and by the time the file arrived at the door he had already been given more material than he had found in six months of wandering. The woman had told him, as they walked, of the three things she had seen in her lifetime that had no natural explanation, each one stranger than the last, each one local and specific and attached to a named place and a named family — the kind of detail that makes a tale feel like testimony.

Inside her house there was a man in a chair by the fire who did not speak but whose presence in the room made it clear that he was a person of consequence in the world the woman inhabited. There was a table laid with food that appeared without being brought, and drink that was poured without a pourer. There were, in the rafters, birds that sang in a language the file could almost understand. He stayed three nights, not one, and in those three nights he was told enough to last him three years of royal bedtimes.

On the morning he left, the woman gave him one instruction: he could tell the stories he had heard, but he must tell them only in the order in which they had been told to him, and he must never tell two on the same night. He agreed, and walked back to Leinster in a state of professional contentment he had not felt in years. He arrived at the king’s chamber that evening and began to tell the first of the new stories.

The king was asleep before the end of the first sentence.

IV. The Finest Story

The file served the king of Leinster for many more years on the strength of those three nights’ tales. He told them slowly, one per night, in the order instructed, and each night the king went to sleep with a new thing in his mind — a new image, a new possibility, a new configuration of the world that he would not have had without the story. The estate remained in the file’s family. The arrangement continued.

When the file was old and approaching the end of his stock again, he went back to look for the woman’s house. He could not find it. The road was there, and the field where he had met her, and the stone wall she had been leaning on. But the house was gone, and no one in that district had any memory of a woman who kept sheep and had birds in her rafters and food that appeared without being brought.

The file went back to the king and told him this story — the story of where he had gone and what he had found and what had happened when he went back. It was, the king said, the finest story he had ever heard, and the file was inclined to agree, because it was the only story in his long career that he had lived himself, and had not needed to borrow from anyone.

That night the king slept without needing to be told anything at all.