Tales for the journey: Tiny's castle (lack of self confidence)

Once upon a time there was a king, who was very small. He was so small that other people called him Tiny, but he was king nonetheless. King Tiny lived in a palace that wasn’t so bad: there was a good view of the hills far away, and there was plenty of food and drink to be had.  He gathered some friends about him and they played games and laughed a lot.  Sometimes they went off and explored the surrounding area, but they always came back to the same place.

Then one day a war began.  There was noise and terror and nothing seemed certain any more.

Tiny summoned a band of men to build him a wall around the palace.  They stopped laughing and playing games and spent all their time building.  At first there was just a wooden palisade, but the noise went on, so they made bricks and dug up stones from the ground nearby.  Sometimes stones were thrown over the wall they were building, but they did not have to be afraid - they just used them to make the walls thicker and higher.

Tiny was proud of his wall.  He was sure it was the best wall in the world. “If we build it just a bit thicker and higher we won’t be able to hear any noise at all!” he cried.

But that didn’t work, so they decided to make their own noise.  They shouted and screamed and jumped until they couldn’t hear anything except their own noise.  This was good!  When there was lots of noise inside as well as out, they could feel safe, but at night there was no sound in the castle Tiny could hear the enemy moving around outside.  He imagined all the ways the enemy might get in, so he decided to make a castle keep, with a thick wall and tiny windows.

He worked so hard on building the castle keep that he sometimes forgot about the war raging outside, and he liked that.