From his earliest days he displayed a disturbing capacity for capturing life on canvas. While other children struggled to draw their first crooked crosses, he perfected his perspective and proportion. His was sent to the Monastery; the monks returned him inside the week—they had nothing left to teach him, and he wouldn’t conform to their rigidity. So he rambled freely over the village, painting.
His snowscapes made viewers shiver, his sunsets made shadows lengthen, and eventually, as is the way of these things, everyone in the surrounding countryside knew someone who had heard someone from the village tell tales about confused bees striking a canvas of flowers . . .
His fame swelled until one day it reached the ears of the King who was hunting in the adjoining forest. The King sent for some of his paintings from his hunting lodge and then sent his crimson-vested soldiers to the village the next day to seize the painter, for he was the type of king who had to have the best of everything.
When the painter was brought before him in his castle with banners fluttering crimson from the towers, the King demanded, “Make for me the best painting in all the land—that is the price of your freedom.”
“What shall I paint?”
“Show me . . .” the King mused, pulling at his beard. A smile scuttled across his face, “Show me an enemy castle under siege . . . no . . . burning.”
And then the painter was confined to a dark and dank cellar under constant guard. He worked days and throughout most of the nights until he fell into an exhausted slumber, when rats crawled over his comatose body to reach the bowl of food he had left unfinished. He mixed paints with his sweat and painted with brushes improvised from his hair. Dried paint crusted his fingernails; wet paint pulsed through his nighttime reveries. And a fiery scene grew day by day beneath his brushes.
So after a fortnight a gaunt, manic-eyed figure with bald patches on his scalp stood in the royal chamber dwarfed by a shrouded canvas. “I have done what you asked—the best painting in the land,” he claimed and removed the cover.
Ominous, lightning-laced clouds had collected over a castle. Below, the very air seemed to be on fire, leaving no doubt that the castle’s very stones would be razed; distant clash of arms and cries of the doomed seemed to echo in the chamber. Courtiers jostled each other anxiously, for sunlight had been snuffed out at the moment of unveiling. Curious soldiers who had drawn close to the painting flinched as if blazing embers had landed on them.
The King stared at the picture, and the flames danced in his eyes. “Yes . . .” he finally breathed, “. . . the finest ever.”
“That was the price for my freedom,” the painter reminded the King.
“Yes!” the King barked, coming out of his trance. “But I cannot leave you to paint something even better. Guards!”
They grabbed the painter, flung him outstretched to the floor; metal chopped down, and was raised for a second blow, when the painter cried, “Wait!” in such an imperious voice that even the steel had to obey.
He got to his feet and stood facing the King, slightly swaying. “My painting isn’t perfect yet . . . there are no banners on the castle.” So saying, he reached into the folds of his cloak for his slimmest brush, dabbed at an artery in the fresh stump at his wrist, and with a few deft strokes, painted banners flapping wildly in the blistering breeze. “It is done.” He turned to face the King once more. “My freedom,” he rasped, “was never yours to rob or return.”
Lightning bolts lanced down from the overcast heavens and the royal chamber became an inferno. Smoke filled the air and the nostrils of panicked courtiers trying to flee the flames. The King sprang for the painter but another bolt set him afire. The fire spread to the rest of the castle and lightning continued to slash at it well into the night; returning shepherds miles away spoke of a bright glow in the evening sky. The charred castle finally stopped glowing as the stars retreated for their daily doze.
As for the painter, he has a much more agreeable patron these days, and he uses a bigger canvas. Watch a sunrise; perhaps you’ll catch him at work, squinting as he searches for just the right shade of salmon . . .  | 
AWESOME!
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