The Boy The King Loved (Pt. 3)

The Origins of the Beloved Boy
Under safer times, the King had taken to meeting with groups of merchants, trades-people and farmers. They would bring complaints sometimes, but more often mere suggestions for how things might go more smoothly between king and subject. Some of these were naïve in the way that only peasants sure of their craft and little else can be naïve. A few were quite insightful and were acted upon swiftly. An arrangement, for example, allowing for tribute proportionate to surplus kept the kingdom’s granaries full and the farmers un-harassed during lean years. It furthermore made the king a powerful (though well liked) benefactor of surrounding hamlets and villages in such times. The surrounding peasants and a few of his own more grateful subjects took to calling him “King Joseph” for a time, though that was a reference to Jacob’s biblical son and not the King’s true name.
The peasant source of this fine policy was not at all a farmer, incidentally. The man had been a monk at one point, though few people of the city knew this. Now he worked only a little, as he was almost blind, presumably from copying manuscripts in the near-dark. His work carried no theme or purpose. Just this or that to augment the money his tall, slender wife made as a mid-wife. They had neither wealth nor prestige, and so his place at a meeting with the king had been come-upon very much by accident.
A shepherd, whose fence he had helped mend, was impressed by his considerable skill with mathematics, though the man lacked sight with which to write down complicated procedures. The man performed them in his head, as it were. The shepherd, aware of the pending discussion with the monarch, invited the modest, blind mathematician. It was his formula that, in the end, would be implemented to assure a just proportionality of tribute from fat years to lean. Everyone at the meeting remarked at the simultaneous genius and practical accessibility of the formula. Those men of lesser character among them went away saying to themselves, “why, I could have thought of such a thing! If only I had!”
The King, grateful for such a practical solution to this problem, offered to the former monk any service he required, within reason. Was there some quandary or trouble haunting the man or his kin? Was there a debt in need of payment? Some definite but serious issue in need of solving? The sightless man spoke as soon as the King had offered.
“My son is clever, but in need of schooling. He knows some letters already, though he lacks my facility with maths,” he said without any evident shyness at acknowledging his talent with numbers. “In my home, his talent will be squandered. He only chops wood and stokes the fire while his mother and I labor as well. On quiet nights I try to teach him some, but it wil come to nothing, I am sure. The court has men of letters who could tutor him, of this I am sure. Would the King value his learning and take him into his heart and home?” He continued with a chuckle “and indeed, into the Kings considerable library?”