The brothers said a quick farewell and moved on before the jinn woke up. He was, they reasoned, more ill-fated than they were. He was more powerful than they could ever dream of being, yet he was as much a cuckold as they were.
They went back to the sultan’s palace. Shahryar was so disgusted with womankind that he couldn’t face killing his wife himself, which would have been the done thing. Instead, he ordered his vizier to dispatch her for him.
After that, he took his sabre and killed her courtesans. That, he could do. You might wonder why he didn’t ask the sultana and her courtesans to give him a few tips – he clearly had much to learn in that department. The answer is that the sultan, like his brother, was not very imaginative. He would sooner sulk than party: you know the type.
And when a sultan sulks, he sulks mightily. No woman could be faithful, he had learned, so he would be faithful to none. He gave his vizier a terrible task: every night the vizier had to send him a new woman to marry, and the morning after, the sultan would kill her, so she would not have time to cuckold him. His brother returned to his smaller kingdom, with no such project in view, but awed by his brother’s intelligent scheme.
The vizier found it, frankly, an over-reaction, and tried to talk the sultan out of it. But Shahryar didn’t listen, and the vizier, who wanted to keep his head attached to his body, sent him the first woman, praying that one would be enough.
It wasn’t.
Every night the sultan married a different woman, and the morning after he chopped off her head with his jewelled sabre. His subjects, who had loved him so much, now weren’t quite so sure. Where there had been trust, a dangerous blend of fear and contempt was creeping in. Besides, the vizier would run out of eligible women sooner or later, and then what?
The vizier had a daughter, and her name was Scheherazade. She would have none of it: if her father could not stop the sultan from sulking murderously, then she would. She asked her father to send her to him.
The vizier was petrified. He asked her not to go, then pleaded, then ordered her not to. But Scheherazade would not hear reason: there was nothing her father could do to stop her. So, already crying for a daughter who was as good as lost, the vizier sent his Scheherazade to the sultan.
Scheherazade had a little sister, whom she asked to prepare herself.
That night the sultan admitted Scheherazade to his rooms. He was awestruck by her beauty, but puzzled when she started crying. What was all that about? Surely, a night with him would more than make up for being beheaded the following morning?
Scheherazade reassured him that it did, of course it did. She was only crying because she wished she could spend her last night on Earth with her sister in the room. Would the sultan allow her sister to sleep at the foot of their bed?
The sultan would.
The three of them awoke just before dawn. The sultan yawned and stirred and (as had become second nature to him) reached out for his sabre. As his fingers closed around the jewelled handle, Scheherazade’s sister asked Scheherazade for a story. One last story, one of the many Scheherazade knew and told so well. Surely the sultan would allow one last story between sisters?
Shahryar was happy to agree. His habit was to behead his wives at the first light of dawn, and it was not dawn yet. Besides, as long as he controlled Scheherazade, as he surely did with his sabre in his hand, she could not trick him.
Scheherazade started to tell her story. It took so long to tell that when the sun rose, the story was not yet over. But Scheherazade accepted with good grace that it was time to go. She had been granted all her wishes and had had the immeasurable pleasure of spending the night with Shahryar. Now she was ready – no, happy – to die.
Shahryar, however, was no longer quite so happy about killing her, at least not right away. He was curious to know how the story ended. He would give her one more night, one night and one only; she would finish her story, and then her neck would taste the kiss of his sabre.
One night became two, and two became twenty. Scheherazade’s lips were magic even when they were weaving a story. She told of merchants and jinns, of warriors and wonders, and she talked of love, and hatred, of the pleasures of the night and the struggles of the day. She told stories within stories, and each of them was a treasure trove of unexpected new things.
A thousand and one nights went by this way, until Scheherazade announced she had finally run out of stories. I think she was lying. I think she could have continued for a thousand and one nights more, but she did not need to. By then Shahryar had forgotten all about his sulking and was madly in love with her.
As for Scheherazade, all things considered, she did not dislike him. He was handsome, and a better man now than he had been a thousand and one nights before.
Scheherazade was Shahryar’s last wife. She took her pleasures abundantly until the end of her days; and he learned from her that you should never sulk when you can join in. Scheherazade’s little sister married Shahryar’s little brother, and both kingdoms were more prosperous than ever before, saved not by a magician, not by a great warrior, but by the most cunning enchanter of all, a teller of tales.
*
We are all that enchanter, though not necessarily as cunning as Scheherazade.
I took some liberties in my retelling of her story, in line with the tradition the story comes from. Folk tales were written down only when the first folklorists started collecting them; before that, they had been transmitted orally for centuries. The tales would change each time they were told, shifting with the teller, the listener and the context. They were not fixed texts in the way that the book you are holding in your hand is a fixed text; they were more like sets of footprints, clear in some cases and faint in others, which each teller would track in her own time, in her own style. What mattered was that the footprints led somewhere; that they had an end. But what was that?
To keep death at bay, Scheherazade tells us. Not her own, but the sultan’s.
Scheherazade herself was never in danger. Her father was the man who found fresh victims for Shahryar, so she was as safe as anyone could be from the sultan’s… sabre. If all she wanted was not to die, there was no need for her to tell stories for a thousand and one nights. She could have stayed at home. She offered herself as the sultan’s latest wife to save her country.
Behind Shahryar’s actions lay a hopelessness that had to be addressed. He had cut himself off from the possibility of love: he was alive, but dying inside. And his victims were dying tout court, so something had to be done. You cannot overpower a murderous sultan; but you can heal him.
Scheherazade entered Shahryar’s bedroom as a psychotherapist, in the literal meaning of the word, that is, as someone who heals the soul (in ancient Greece, Psyche was the soul, and also the lover of Eros, love itself, while therapeaia means ‘healing’). She went in there expressly to tell stories, to use them to make the sultan better, night after night. And they were not just any old stories: for a thousand and one nights, Scheherazade told wonder tales (another name for fairy tales, less common, but better fitting). The root of the sultan’s problem was that he had lost his sense of wonder, he was jaded – he thought he had learned all of life’s lessons. Scheherazade took him on a journey not dissimilar to ours, to show him that was not the case.
For a thousand and one nights, the sultan ambled in the maze of words that Scheherazade conjured up around him, and he found there enchantment and adventure, sorcery and magic, jinns, ghouls and other marvels. For a thousand and one nights the sultan gorged on wonder, until, finally replete, he was once again ready to live his life.