But as I’ve noted elsewhere,1 she has a few other things going for her as well. We’re told specifically that as word of Shahryar’s homicidal virgin-a-night policy spreads, so many parents flee the country with their daughters that by the time of our story there’s not a maidenhead remaining for the Vizier to produce (on pain of death if he fails to) except those of his own daughters, whom Shahryar has been sparing as a political courtesy. Deranged though he is, one suspects that the King too is aware of that circumstance, and that if he kills Scheherazade the jig is up in any case. Moreover (as Scheherazade’s dad will doubtless also have told her), back when the King first learned of his brother Shah Zaman’s habitual cuckolding but was as yet unaware of his own, he’d vowed that if he himself were ever thus disgraced he would kill “a thousand women in revenge,” despite the fact that “that way madness lies”—and now he’s done so, and thus the time is ripe to re-think his modus operandi.
But hey, this is a Monarch we’re dealing with, and a nut-case one at that, and so the royal Face must be saved even though the situation is staring him in it. Like, maybe, give him a little more time to come to terms with the obvious? Some sort of face-and-butt-saving interlude? How about an unobtrusively pointed story—or better yet, a whole string of stories and stories-within-stories, their delivery artfully timed to break off daily at sunrise just when the plot is really revving up, the way TV drama-serials will do a thousand years later?
And so on Night One, what will become a ritual is established: Against her rueful father’s wishes (whom she disarms with a couple of also-pointed stories), Scheherazade “goes in unto the King,” and as he prepares to go in unto her, she pleads with him to let her sister (whom she has prepped for the role) be with her on this “last night of my life.” The King consents. Dunyazade takes up her position at the foot of the royal bed, witnesses her sister’s defloration and the couple’s post-coital nap, and at midnight, on cue from Scheherazade, begs for a story to entertain all hands till dawn. Big Sis secures permission from the King (who, not surprisingly, “happened to be sleepless and restless”) and obliges with the intricated “Tale of the Merchant and the Jinee,” itself involving three tales-within-the-tale, all having to do with the tellers’ lives being spared by their stories, and the last winding up exactly at their teller’s appointed doom-time, the crack of dawn. Dunyazade praises her sister’s narrative performance; Scheherazade pooh-poohs it, declaring it to be nothing compared to what she could come up with tomorrow night, if only…. The King says okay (“By Allah, I won’t slay her until I hear more of her wondrous stories!”), rises to go about his kingly business of “bidding and forbidding between man and man” (but neither bids the Vizier to go execute his daughter nor explains the reprieve), then returns for a second night of sex/sleep/storytelling — and the pattern is established for 999 nights thereafter, Dunyazade maintaining her rather kinky foot-of-the-royal-bed position as Primer of the Narrative Pump, Scheherazade turning out story after story (always, as each ends, immediately beginning another and then interrupting it at dawn’s early light) and — so we learn on Night 1001—turning out baby after baby as well, for whose sakes she pleads on that fateful morn for her life to be thenceforth spared.
WHY THEN, RATHER than on Night 666, say, or 777, or 1111? Why indeed are there 1001 nights instead of some other number? Mainly, no doubt, because just as “a thousand” is traditional shorthand for “a lot” (as in the Hazar Afsaneh’s “thousand tales” and Scheherazade’s “thousand books about ancient peoples and rulers”), so 1001 is “plenty and then some,” like Simon Bond’s popular 101 Uses for a Dead Cat. But think again: three sons conceived, brought to term, and delivered over the same span of time that Shahryar previously took to fulfill his threat to “kill a thousand women” in revenge for his cuckolding. The moment is doubly auspicious, especially if it happens to coincide with Scheherazade’s having. . exhausted her narrative repertory, perhaps?
Maybe, maybe not. But while numerical appropriateness is sufficient cause, and narrative exhaustion a not-impossible extra reason for Scheherazade’s choosing Night 1001 to plead for the reprieve that she no doubt understands (and Shahyrar promptly acknowledges) to have been long since tacitly granted her, my imagination was piqued some decades ago to come up with yet a third possibility, an additional coincidence suggested by her sons’ approximate ages: “one walking, one crawling, one suckling.” For the messy details, see the aforenoted essay “Don’t Count On It,” which half-seriously imagines that by way of additional life insurance the Vizier’s cunning daughter will have timed her volunteered devirginization to coincide as closely as possible with one of her monthly ovulations, in hopes of a prompt impregnation (with her life hanging in the balance, she would most assuredly not want her menses to arrive early in the game!). Assuming for gee-whiz story-purposes a successful conception on Night 1 (Why not? It’s an Arabian Night) and working then from the arithmetical average number of days from human conception to birth (266), then the average time from delivery to first subsequent menstruation (49 days), and from then to earliest next ovulation and possible second conception (14 days), et cetera, one arrives at the fascinating possibility that on that fateful 1002nd morning, when Scheherazade orders the nurses to fetch in the kids and pleads for permanent absolution on their behalf, not only will her three boys have been at the right ages for “walking” (two years + four days), “crawling” (thirteen months + ten days), and “suckling” (two and a half months), but their mom — having resumed post-partum menstruation 49 days after her third delivery (Night 974) — might to her own dismay on Morning 1002 have found herself, after only a normal lunar month, for the first time re-menstruating instead of having been re-impregnated per usual by the King! It’s a circumstance of which Shahryar would have to be apprised immediately, since by Muslim law he cannot “go in unto” his wife that night, as their whole past history will have led him to anticipate doing. Having just concluded the Tale of Ma-aruf the Cobbler and Fatimah the Turd (her final narrative performance in the complete 10-volume Burton edition), this most resourceful of storytellers must either launch into some new one — surpassing it and Sinbad and Ali Baba combined — or else surprise her lord and master with something no less extraordinary than, so to speak, her first-ever Second Menstruation in their 1001-night history. Like, say, trotting in their offspring and saying, in effect, “Enough of this Let-Me-Entertain-You thing already: Why not come off it, marry me, and make our kids legit?”