Time is both wrapped away and then spread out,
Now an extended line and now a cone.
Drink to its beauty if you can be sure
That you will not leave or abandon me.
They went on like this until night fell, and this second day was better than the first. When night came, the lady went to her bedroom, leaving only the maids with Sharkan, who threw himself on the ground and slept until morning. The maids then came to him as usual, with their tambourines and musical instruments. When he saw them, he got up and they walked with him to meet the lady. She got up when she saw him, took him by the hand and set him down by her side. She asked him what kind of night he had spent, and in return he wished her long life. She then took the lute and recited the lines:
Do not leave or part from me,
For parting’s taste is bitter.
When the sun sets, it is the pain
Of parting that has made it pale.
While they were occupied like this, there was a sudden commotion, with men crowding in and knights with drawn swords flashing in their hands, shouting in Greek: ‘You have fallen into our hands, Sharkan; be sure that we shall kill you.’ When Sharkan heard this, he said to himself: ‘This girl has played a trick on me and has kept me here until her men could come. These are the riders with whom she threatened me, but it was I who brought the danger on myself.’ He turned to reproach her but found that she had turned pale, and she then leapt to her feet, saying: ‘Who are you?’ The leader of the knights replied: ‘Noble princess, pearl without equal, do you know who this man is who is with you?’ ‘No,’ she replied, ‘who is he?’ ‘He is the ravager of lands, the master of riders, Sharkan, son of King ‘Umar ibn al-Nu‘man, the conqueror of castles, who has taken every strong fortress. News of him was brought to your father, King Hardub, by the old woman Dhat al-Dawahi and the king checked that what she had reported was true. You have brought help to the army of Byzantium by capturing this ill-omened lion.’
When the lady heard this, she looked at the leader and asked him for his name. ‘I am Masura, the son of your slave Mawsura, son of Kashardah, the champion of the knights.’ ‘How is it that you have entered without my leave?’ she asked. ‘My lady,’ he replied, ‘when I came to the door, no chamberlain or gatekeeper stopped me. Rather, they all got up and walked ahead of us, as is the custom, whereas when anyone else comes they leave him standing by the gate until they get leave for him to enter. But this is no time for talking. The king is waiting for us to return with this prince, who is the thorn of the army of Islam, so that he may kill him and send his army back to where they came from without putting us to the trouble of having to fight them.’
When the lady heard this, she said: ‘What you say is not good. Dhat al-Dawahi lied and what she said was untrue, as she did not know the truth of the matter. I swear by the Messiah that this man who is with me is not Sharkan, nor is he a prisoner. He is someone who came here, approached us and asked for hospitality, which we granted him. Even if I was sure that he was Sharkan himself and this was established beyond doubt, it would not accord with my honour to allow you to take someone who is under my protection. Do not force me to betray my guest or put me to open shame, but go back to the king, my father, kiss the ground before him and tell him that the matter is not as Dhat al-Dawahi said.’ ‘Princess Abriza,’ said Masura the knight, ‘I cannot go back to the king without taking his enemy with me.’ ‘Damn you,’ said the lady in a rage, ‘go back to him with my answer and you will not be blamed.’ ‘I will not go off without him,’ replied Masura.
The lady’s colour changed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘This man only came in here because he was sure that he, by himself, could attack a hundred riders. Were I to say to him: “You are Sharkan, son of King ‘Umar ibn al-Nu‘man,” he would say yes, but I shall not allow you to interfere with him. If you do, he will not leave you until he has killed everyone here. He is here with me and I shall bring him out before you with his sword and his shield.’ Masura replied: ‘Your anger will not hurt me but your father’s anger will. When I see Sharkan, I shall give the sign to my men, and when they have captured him, we shall take him as a humiliated prisoner to the king.’ ‘This shall not be,’ she said. ‘It is pure folly. Here is a single man and there are a hundred of you. If you want to fight him, go out to meet him one by one, so that the king may see which of you is the champion.’
Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say. Then, when it was the fiftieth night, SHE CONTINUED:
I have heard, O auspicious king, that Princess Abriza told Masura: ‘He is one single man and you are a hundred knights. If you want to fight him, go out to meet him one by one, so that the king may see who is the champion among you.’ Masura replied: ‘By the truth of the Messiah, what you say is right, but the first to go out against him will be no one except me.’ ‘Wait, then,’ she said, ‘until I go and tell him about this to see what his reply will be. If he agrees, well and good, but if he refuses, you cannot touch him for I and everyone in this convent, including my maids, will be his ransom.’ She then went and explained to Sharkan what had happened. He smiled when he learned that she had not told anyone about him and that it was not due to her that word of his being there had reached the king, but he went back to blaming himself, wondering how he came to have risked his life in Byzantine territory.
After listening to what the princess had to say, he told her: ‘To make them come out against me one at a time would be to wrong them. Why not let them come out in groups of ten?’ ‘It’s a mistake to be too clever,’ she said. ‘It must be one to one.’ At that, Sharkan leapt to his feet and went to confront them with his sword and the rest of his battle gear. Masura rushed in to attack him, but Sharkan met him like a lion and struck him on the shoulder with his sword, which came out gleaming from his back and his innards. When the lady saw this, her opinion of Sharkan rose and she realized that it had been her beauty and not her strength that had allowed her to throw him. She went up to the knights and told them to avenge their comrade, at which the dead man’s brother, a huge and stubborn fighter, came out against Sharkan, who with no delay struck him on the shoulder, the sword coming out gleaming from his innards. She called to the others to avenge him and they came one after the other, but Sharkan’s sword play left fifty of them dead, as she looked on. God then struck fear into the hearts of the survivors, who hung back and did not dare challenge him singly, but all attacked together. For his part, Sharkan charged against them with a heart harder than stone and crushed them as though on a threshing floor, robbing them of their wits and their lives.
The princess called to her maids: ‘Who is left in the convent?’ ‘No one,’ they answered, ‘except for the gatekeepers.’ She then went to meet Sharkan and embraced him, and as he had finished fighting, he went with her back to her apartments. There were still a few knights left, hiding in corners, and when she saw them she left Sharkan and came back, wearing a closely knit coat of mail, with an Indian sword in her hand. ‘By the truth of the Messiah,’ she said, ‘I shall not grudge to give my life for my guest, and I shall not desert him, even if that brings me disgrace throughout the lands of Byzantium.’ When she looked at the knights, she found that he had killed eighty of them, while twenty had taken to their heels. When she saw what he had done to them, she said to him: ‘Men like you are the boast of the riders. How excellent you are, Sharkan!’ Wiping his sword clean of the blood, he recited:
How many a host have I scattered in battle,
Leaving their armoured men as food for the wild beasts.
Ask all mankind about both me and them,
When I attack on the day of battle.
I have left their lions overthrown in war,
Among those plains upon the burning ground.
When he had finished these lines, the princess came up to him smiling, kissed his hand and took off the mail coat that she was wearing. He asked her: ‘Why did you put this on and draw y
our sword?’ ‘Because I wanted to help you against those wretches,’ she said. Then she summoned the gatekeepers and said: ‘How did you come to let the king’s companions enter my house without my leave?’ ‘Princess,’ they answered, ‘it is not usual for us to need your permission for royal messengers and, in particular, the leader of the knights.’ ‘I think that what you wanted,’ she said, ‘was to dishonour me and to kill my guest,’ and she then ordered Sharkan to cut off their heads, and when he had done that, she told her other servants that these had deserved an even worse fate.
She then turned to Sharkan and said: ‘What was hidden has now become clear to you and so I shall tell you my story. You must know that I am the daughter of Hardub, king of Rum; my name is Abriza and the old woman known as Dhat al-Dawahi is my grandmother on my father’s side. It was she who told my father about you and she will certainly try to have me killed, particularly now that you have killed my father’s men and word has spread that I have left and gone to the bad among the Muslims. The sensible thing for me to do is to leave here while Dhat al-Dawahi is on my heels. I would like you to repay me the kindness that I did you, as it is thanks to you that I am on hostile terms with my father. So do everything that I say, for you are the cause of all this.’
When Sharkan heard this, he was out of his mind with joy and filled with happiness. ‘By God,’ he said, ‘no enemy is going to touch you as long as I have breath in my body, but can you bear to part from your father and your people?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, and Sharkan swore an oath for her, after which they made a pact. ‘Now I am at ease,’ she said, ‘but I have one more condition for you.’ ‘What is that?’ he asked. ‘That you lead your army back to your own country,’ she told him. ‘My lady,’ he said, ‘my father, ‘Umar ibn al-Nu‘man, has sent me to fight against your father because of the treasure that he took, including three large jewels, which can bring great good fortune.’ ‘You can set your heart at rest,’ she said, ‘and console yourself, for I’ll tell you about them and explain the reason for the feud with the emperor of Constantinople. We have an annual festival, called the Feast of the Convent, to which kings come from all parts, together with the daughters of the great, as well as merchants and their wives, and they stay for seven days.
‘I used to be one of those who went there, but after we had become enemies, my father stopped me from going to the festival for seven years. It happened one year that the daughters of the great came there as usual from all parts. One of them was the daughter of the emperor of Constantinople, a beautiful girl named Sophia. They stayed in the convent for six days and on the seventh, when everyone left, Sophia insisted on going back to Constantinople by sea, and so a ship was made ready for her, which she boarded with her own attendants. They set sail and put out to sea, but while they were on their way, a wind got up and blew the ship off course. As fate would have it, a Christian ship from the Island of Camphor was there with five hundred armed Franks on board. They had been at sea for a long time and when they saw the sails of the ship carrying Sophia and her maids, they quickly gave chase. In less than an hour, they had caught up with it and had thrown grappling irons on board. After lowering its sails, they towed it towards their island, but soon they met a contrary wind which dragged them on to a reef and tore their sails. Their ship was then driven on to our shore, and as we saw that this was booty that had been brought to us, we seized the men and killed them, and then we found the wealth, the gifts and the forty girls, among whom was the emperor’s daughter, Sophia.
‘The girls were taken and brought to my father, but we didn’t know that one of them was Afridun’s daughter. My father chose ten of them, among them being Sophia, and the rest he distributed among his retainers. Out of the ten, my father picked five, including Sophia, whom he sent to your father, ‘Umar ibn al-Nu‘man, together with broadcloth, woollen clothing and Byzantine silks. Your father accepted the gift and chose Sophia from out of the five. At the beginning of the year, her father wrote a letter to mine in terms that cannot be repeated, with threats and abuse, saying: “Two years ago, you plundered a ship of ours which had been taken by Frankish pirates. On board was my daughter Sophia, together with about sixty maids. You did not tell me or send any messenger to bring me the news. I did not make this public, for fear that, had my daughter had been dishonoured, this would be a source of shame for me among my peers. I kept the affair hidden until this year when I wrote a message to a number of Frankish pirates to ask whether there was any word of my daughter among the kings of the islands.” They replied: “By God, we did not take her from your lands, but we have heard that she was captured from some pirates by King Hardub,” and they told him the story. The emperor added in his letter: “Unless you want to be on hostile terms with me, and unless your intention is to disgrace me and dishonour my daughter, as soon as you receive my letter you are to return her to me. If you ignore this message and disobey my command, then I shall have to pay you back for your foul and evil actions.”
‘When the letter reached my father and he had read it and grasped its contents, he was distressed, regretting that he had not known that the emperor’s daughter had been among the girls, so that he could have sent her back to her father. He was at a loss to know what to do, as after all this time it was no longer possible for him to write to King ‘Umar ibn al-Nu‘man and ask for her return, more especially since we had recently heard that a concubine of his, called Sophia, had given birth to children. When we had confirmed this, we realized that this letter spelt disaster and my father had no recourse except to send a reply to the emperor, excusing himself and swearing on oath that he had not known that his daughter had been among the girls on that ship, and he told him that she had been sent to King ‘Umar ibn al-Nu‘man, by whom she had borne children.
‘When my father’s letter reached the emperor, he flew into a rage, frothing and foaming. “How dared he make a captive of my daughter,” he cried, “so that she became like a slave girl, passed from hand to hand, and given to kings who sleep with her without any marriage contract? By the truth of the Messiah and the true religion, I shall not take this insult sitting down, but I shall seek revenge and clear away this shame, doing a deed that people will talk about after I am dead.” He waited until he had concocted a clever plan, sending an embassy to your father, ‘Umar ibn al-Nu‘man, with the message that you heard, which led your father to send you out with your army. As for the three gems that he told your father about when he asked for help, there is no truth in his story. They were with Sophia, his daughter, and my father took them from her when she and her companions fell into his hands. He gave them to me and I have them now. So go to your men and lead them back before they advance too far into the lands of the Franks and the Byzantines. For if you go on, they will close in on you and you won’t be able to escape from them until the Day of Judgement. I know that your men are still where you left them because you told them to stay for three days, and also, as they have not been able to find you during this time, they have not known what to do.’
When Sharkan heard this, he went off for a time, deep in thought. Then he kissed the hand of Princess Abriza and said: ‘Praise be to God Who has favoured me with you and has sent you to save me and my companions. I find it difficult to part from you and I don’t know what will happen to you after I leave.’ ‘Go to your army now,’ she said, ‘and withdraw them. If the envoys are with them, arrest them so as to learn the facts of the matter while you are still near your own country. After three days, I shall join you and we shall enter Baghdad together.’ Then, when Sharkan was about to leave, she added: ‘Don’t forget the pact between us.’
She got up to stand with him, embrace him, say goodbye and quench the fire of her longing. After her farewell embrace, she wept bitterly and recited:
I said farewell, as my right hand wiped away my tears,
While my left hand folded her in my embrace.
‘Do you not fear disgrace?’ she said, and I said no.
The day of parting is the
lovers’ disgrace.
Sharkan then left her and went down from the convent. They brought him his horse and he rode out on his way to the drawbridge, which he crossed before entering the trees. Having passed through them, he rode across the meadow, to be confronted by three riders. He was wary of them and, drawing his sword, he rode towards them, but when they came nearer, they recognized him, while, for his part, he saw that one of them was the vizier Dandan, accompanied by two emirs. When they saw and recognized him, they dismounted and greeted him. In answer to Dandan’s question why he had been away, he told them everything that had happened to him with Princess Abriza from beginning to end. Dandan gave praise to God and then said to Sharkan: ‘Lead us out of these lands, for the envoys who were with us have gone to tell their king that we have arrived and it may be that they will come in a hurry to seize us.’ They all moved as fast as they could until they reached the floor of the valley. Meanwhile, the envoys had brought their king news of Sharkan’s arrival, and he had prepared a force to seize him and his companions.
So much for them, but as for Sharkan, Dandan and the two emirs, they had already given urgent orders to the army to march. The Muslims left at once and travelled for five days before halting to rest for a while in a wooded valley and then pressing on. After twenty-five days, they were on the edge of the borders of their own land, and there, thinking themselves safe, they dismounted to rest again. The locals brought out guest provisions for them, fodder for their beasts and food for the men. After a two-day halt, they set off for home, Sharkan staying in the rear with a hundred riders, while Dandan led off the rest of the army.
The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights: Volume 1 Page 45