1Kavi Vishtaspa held his court in a broad country of rivers, with a wall of earth about his house and three hundred horses in his fields. The old tellers name him, and his queen Hutaosa, and two brothers of the house of Hvogva who served him: Frashaostra, and Jamaspa who was called the wise. All these are remembered by Zarathustra's people to this day.
2The tellers also speak of a doorkeeper. They give him no name, and only a small part. This book gives him a name, Parshad, and imagines the rest, for the story turns on him as a gate turns on its pin.
3Parshad kept the door of the guest house, where strangers of rank were lodged. He was fifty, with a stiff knee and a daughter to marry and no cattle to send with her. He was honest in the way most men are honest: he had never been offered enough.
4In the spring of that year a tall worn priest came out of the north with a herdsman and a family and two thin horses. He asked to speak before the king. Parshad gave him the corner room, since no one else wanted it.
5Now Vishtaspa was as the traders had said. He was young, and he liked to know things. He kept at his table a company of karapans and wise men, and he set them questions, and it pleased him to see them worry at the questions like dogs at a bone.
6The stranger was brought in and questioned. The tellers say it lasted three days. On the first day the wise men were amused. On the second they were angry. On the third they were silent. They put to him every hard thing they knew, and he answered each one. Then he asked them the things he had asked for twenty years: who set the sun on its road, and whether the one who made that order could love a lie, and why they read fair signs for any lord who paid.
7Parshad stood at the door of the hall with his staff and heard some of it. He saw the king lean forward on the third day with his chin on his fist, and he saw Jamaspa the wise watching the stranger without blinking. And he saw the faces of the karapans. He had been a doorkeeper thirty years and he knew what a man looks like who sees his living walk out of the room.
8That night the chief of the court priests came to Parshad's lodge. He was a smooth, grey man named Zak.
9"You have a daughter," said Zak.
10"I have."
11"A good girl. It is a pity about the cattle." He laid a small bag on the floor, and it made the sound that gold makes. "Five cows' worth. There will be five more after. I ask a small thing. Tomorrow, while the stranger is at the king's table, you will let my servant into the corner room for as long as it takes to say a prayer. You will not go in with him. You will not see what he carries. Afterward you will have seen nothing, and that will be the truth, for you will have looked at the wall."
12"What will he carry?"
13"You are not listening. You will not know. That is the beauty of it. No one will ask you to swear to anything but what you saw, and you will have seen a wall."
14Parshad looked at the bag for a long time. He thought: the stranger is nothing to me. He thought: I will not have told a lie. I will only have opened a door, and opening doors is my work.
15He took the bag.
16The next day the servant came with a covered basket and was in the room for the length of a prayer. Parshad stood in the passage with his face to the wall. It was an ordinary wall of mud brick with a crack in it shaped like a river. He saw it afterward whenever he shut his eyes.
17On the morning after, Zak stood up before the king, grave and sorrowful. He said that a thing had come to his ears which he could hardly believe. He said the stranger's clever tongue was not his own; it was got by dark arts. He begged the king to send and search the man's room.
18They searched. Under the bedding they found what the tellers say was found: the bones and hair and parings of the dead, and the heads of unclean beasts, the things a sorcerer keeps. They were laid out on a cloth before the king's seat. The hall drew back from them.
19Zarathustra looked at the cloth, and then at the faces of the priests, one by one. "These are not mine," he said. "I have never seen them. I do not know how they came to my room."
20"Who has the key to that room?" the king asked.
21"The doorkeeper, lord."
22Parshad was brought forward. His knee would hardly hold him. The king asked: had any man entered the stranger's room?
23And Parshad said, "Lord, I saw no one enter." It was exactly true. He had been looking at the wall.
24Remember that, you who think a lie must be a false word. He did not say one false word.
25Vishtaspa was young, and he had been made a fool of before his court, or thought he had. He had leaned toward this man. He had half given him his ear, and now on a cloth before him lay the proof that he had been bewitched like a farm boy. His anger was the anger of a proud man who has been deceived. He ordered the stranger put in the pit-house by the stables, without food, until it was decided what death was fitting.
26The herdsman cousin shouted that it was false and was beaten from the hall. That evening Parshad found five more cows' worth of gold under his stool. He put it with the first bag and did not open either.
27Seven days went by.
28The tellers put a wonder here, about the king's black horse, and how it fell sick and was healed. That tale belongs to Zarathustra's own people and this book leaves it with them. This book tells of a smaller thing, which no one saw.
29On the fourth night Parshad could not sleep. He got up and took a jar of water and a piece of bread, and went limping across the dark yard to the pit-house. The guard was asleep. There was a slot in the door at the height of a man's knee.
30"Priest," he whispered. "Are you living?"
31There was a movement in the dark. "I am. Who is it?"
32"No one. Here is water. Do not say who brought it."
33"I cannot say who brought it. I cannot see you." The water was drunk. Then the voice said, "But I know your step. You favour the left knee. You are the doorkeeper."
34Parshad's mouth went dry. He should have gone then. He stayed, crouched on his bad knee in the stable muck.
35"Then you know," he said. "You must have known from the first hour. No one else had the key. Why did you not say it? Before the king. You had only to point at me. He would have put me to the question and I would have broken in a day; I am not brave. Why have you sat here four days starving and not said the doorkeeper did it?"
36"Because I did not see you do it," said the voice from the dark.
37"But you knew!"
38"I thought it likely. That is not the same. Perhaps you slept, and the key was taken from your belt. Perhaps there is another key. I have spent my life telling men not to say what they do not know. Should I begin now, to save my skin, by swearing to a thing I only guess? Then Zak and I would be two of a kind, and the king would be choosing between two liars. He has enough of those."
39Parshad knelt in the dark and found that he was weeping. He had not wept since his wife died.
40"You are a fool," he said. "They will kill you."
41"They may. Doorkeeper, I will tell you what I do know, since you ask. I know you told the king you saw no one enter. And I heard your voice when you said it. A man telling a plain truth does not sound like that. So I think you said a true thing in order that a false thing should be believed. I did that for years. I sang true words over false deeds. I know how it sits in the chest afterward." There was a pause. "I am not asking you for anything. You have a daughter, I am told. I only say it because you came."
42Parshad went back across the yard. He lay down. He saw the crack in the wall.
43He thought it through the way a slow man does, with his lips moving. If he held his tongue, the stranger died, and Parshad's daughter was married with ten cows, and no one ever knew. Zak would see to that. He had only to go on having looked at a wall.
44If he spoke, he confessed to taking a bribe to ruin the king's guest. At the very best he would lose his place, and the gold, and the girl would have a father who was known for it.
45He weighed it all night and it would not come out even. In the grey before dawn he thought of something else. He thought: the king is going to kill a man for sorcery, and afterward he will believe in sorcery more than before. He will trust Zak more than before. And Zak, who has learned that this works, will do it again, to the next man who troubles him. And I will be the door he uses. I will be the door for the rest of my life.
46He got up, and put on his clean coat, and took the two bags in his hands. He went to the hall at the hour of judgments and stood in his usual place until his name was not called, and then he walked out into the middle of the floor without it.
47"Lord," he said. His voice cracked like a boy's. "I told you that I saw no one enter the stranger's room. That was true. I saw no one because I had turned my face to the wall. I turned it because I had been paid to." He put down the bags on the place where the cloth had lain. "Ten cows' worth. A servant went in with a basket while I looked away. I did not see what was in the basket. I will not say I did. But the things were found the next day, and I have never in thirty years let a guest's room be entered, before or since."
48There was no sound in the hall at all.
49"Who paid you?" said the king.
50Parshad turned and looked at Zak. He did not need to point.
51Zak was very good. He laughed sadly, and spread his hands, and said that here was the sorcerer's work again, a poor simple man bewitched into slander; and for a moment it hung there, for he said it well. Then Jamaspa the wise spoke from his place beside the king.
52"A man who is bewitched to slander you," said Jamaspa, "is seldom bewitched to hang himself in the same breath. The doorkeeper has just confessed a crime that may cost his life. I have not often seen a liar begin with that." He looked at the bags. "And the gold can be asked. Gold is weighed out by someone. The treasurer of the priests' house keeps a tally."
53The king sent for the treasurer and for the servant. It did not take long after that. A lie that has to be held up by five men is a heavy lie, and when one man lets go, the others' arms begin to shake.
54They brought Zarathustra up out of the pit-house. He could not stand without a man at each side. The tellers say that Vishtaspa heard him then with a whole ear, and that Queen Hutaosa heard him also, and that both took up his teaching, and Frashaostra and Jamaspa with them. So after twelve years of one cousin, he had a king. That is the turning of his story, and his people have held it in honour ever since.
55But this chapter stays with the doorkeeper.
56Zak and those with him were put out of the court. Then the king turned to Parshad, who stood waiting with his head down, having already said farewell to his life.
57"You took gold to open a door on my guest."
58"Yes, lord."
59"And you came here this morning and said so, when no one suspected you, and no one could have proved it."
60"Yes, lord."
61The king looked at him a long while. He was a young man learning something, and it showed in his face. "I have forty men in this hall," he said, "who would never have taken that gold, because no one offered it. I do not know what one of them is worth. I know what you are worth. I know to the cow." He pushed the bags back across the floor with his foot. "Keep your door. The gold goes back to the priests' house. Your daughter's cattle I will send myself. And when a guest is in that room, doorkeeper, look at the door."
62Parshad kept the door of the guest house for eleven more years.
63He never became learned in the new teaching. When the young ones asked him about the two ways, the true and the false, he would say that he knew nothing of such high matters. He knew that there had been a wall, and a door, and that for four days he had looked at the one so as not to see the other. "I did not say one false word," he would tell them. "Not one. Think about that when you are pleased with yourselves."