“Ah,” said the fish. “That must make you very angry.”
“It makes me boil,” said the man of Dabberding. “My wife is sick because my neighbor dragged her out in a rainstorm to help him gather up his geese. My children need shoes because they went to help their mother and ruined the shoes I’d just bought them. The cow went dry because my neighbor said his bull would breed her for less then I usually pay. The bull was no good, but my neighbor wouldn’t give me my money back. The donkey is lame because my wife had to ride her in the mud, into the village, to see the healer. My old dog is on her last legs because she caught cold for trying to bring the geese in, and the fox is eating my chickens because my neighbor’s no-good bull bashed a hole in the coop, and I’ve no wire to fix it with.”
“So you’re angry,” said the fish.
“Oh, if my neighbor were here in front of me, I’d bash him bloody,” said the man of Dabberding. “This is all his fault.”
“Is there anything you’re angry about that the right information wouldn’t fix?” asked the fish.
The man of Dabberding thought for a while, then he said, “I would know how I could heal my wife, how to make shoes for the children, where I could find a good bull, where I could find a little money to rent another donkey to let my donkey rest until his leg gets better, who’s giving away a good pup so my old dog could lie contented in the sun, and how to keep the vermin out of my chicken coop.”
“Then the problem is solved,” said the fish. “I will tell you where to go.”
So the fish told him to go down a certain forest road, and up a certain steep hill, and through a long thicket, and out onto a precipice where a little temple stood all by itself, and inside the temple was an altar, and on the altar was an image. “That little image has all the information in the universe,” it said. “There’s nothing it doesn’t know.”
So the man of Dabberding set off down the forest road. As he went, he thought about his encounter with the fish, and as he thought about that it gradually came to him that the little temple the fish spoke of might possibly belong to King Frum the Furious, and a bad-tempered, ill-natured king he was, too.
Still, the fish hadn’t said anything about it, so the man from Dabberding went on until he came to the steep hill, which he climbed, and into the thicket, which he fought his way through, then out onto the precipice where the temple stood. Sure enough, inside was an altar stone, and on the stone was an image, a statue of a little old man with a long beard and a wrinkled face and squinched-up eyes, sitting cross-legged and peering at a golden book in his lap, a book with writing that flowed across the page like water.
Well, the man from Dabberding didn’t even pause for thought. He took the image, wrapped it in his jacket, and went across the temple to look over the cliff edge to see where he was in relation to the river and the places he knew. He had just located the river when he heard loud voices coming from below. He looked around, and there was a path coming up the cliff from one side with men on it, and there was another path leading along the cliff with more men on it, both headed in his direction. He couldn’t get back to the thicket without being seen. He couldn’t even get into the temple without being seen. If they found him with the little image in his shirt, they would kill him for sure.
So the man sobbed silently, threw the image far out into the air, watched it fall partway, then he sat down on the precipice and waited.
The men arrived, among them King Frum the Furious, and they found the image missing at once. They surrounded the man of Dabberding and asked him where the little man with the golden book was. “I don’t know,” he said truthfully, for he hadn’t seen it land. “Who was it an image of?” he asked, because he didn’t know that either.
They knocked him down and searched him, but he had no statue. They searched the edges of the thicket, but there was no statue. And all the while the king lamented and lamented that his luck was gone, the pride of his lineage was gone, the image of the keeper was gone.
“Keeper?” asked the man from Dabberding. “What’s a keeper?”
“It’s a thing that knew all the king’s secrets,” whispered one of the men-at-arms. “That little statue knows everything that has ever happened in the whole world.”
“In the whole universe,” whispered another man-at-arms. “Where could it have gone?”
“An eagle, perhaps,” said the man from Dabberding. “Or a large raven. Ravens like sparkly things.”
“That’s true,” said the first man-at-arms, and he went to tell the king, who was still lamenting. After a time, the man-at-arms came back and told the man from Dabberding to get himself gone before the king remembered he was there, which the man did very quickly, fading himself into the thicket like a rabbit into a burrow.
The man got himself through the thicket, down
