Shadow Spinner

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by Susan Fletcher


  But on the second night, the same thing happened: they sent for her sister, Shahrazad left off spinning her story at another exciting part, and the Sultan let her live again.

  And it had gone on that way for more than two and a half years. During that time, Shahrazad had given the Sultan three sons—one just this past week. Now everyone in the city breathed easier. People no longer hid their daughters or sent them away with Abu Muslem, the famous outlaw who helped women escape. Shahrazad had stopped the killings.

  So I had heard of Dunyazad, Shahrazad’s sister. But somehow I had never thought about her very much.

  Until now.

  The main thing I kept thinking about her now was, I wish that shed slow down. She kept disappearing behind screens and walls and archways, and I had to run to keep from losing her. She skirted a deserted open courtyard where ruby-throated birds perched in fragrant trees, then she crossed a stream that gurgled between banks of vivid blue tile. She opened a hidden paneled door and climbed into a dim, musty-smelling passageway that wound this way and that. Through tiny windows I could glimpse other empty rooms and courtyards, each decorated with tilework and carvings and gold. We came out at a marble colonnade near a wide flight of green-glazed steps; Dunyazad bounded up, then strode across a high balcony that overlooked a courtyard below. Reaching into a cranny of a carved wooden screen, she released a hidden latch, opened it, then plunged down the narrow stairway beyond.

  And all the while I saw not a single living soul. There was a hushed, eerie feeling to this place. All those sofas with no one to sit on them. All that beauty with no one to see. Beyond the echoes of our footsteps, I could almost hear the whispered voices of the women who had lived here before the Sultans purge.

  All gone now. All slain.

  I followed Dunyazad down the stairs to a hallway floored in gray marble. She ducked into a small draped cubicle and seemed to have vanished entirely until I heard a rattling sound and pulled the drape aside. Through a beaded curtain, I glimpsed a ripple of yellow silk; I hastened after it into a courtyard.

  My foot was hurting now; it does when I go far or fast. But worse than the pain was the mounting fear that I would be lost. I could wander through this labyrinth and not find my way out for days. Weeks, maybe. I would have to drink the water in the pools. I would have to catch the fish that darted within them, eat them raw. Or maybe they would lift up their heads and talk to me, tell me how . . .

  Stop spinning shadows! I told myself sternly. Look to your own survival!

  “Here.” Dunyazad was climbing a flight of stairs to a high-arched doorway off an alabaster-tiled corridor. She disappeared within; I heard a voice, a greeting.

  Shahrazad?

  And now I stopped, uncertain.

  I looked down at my coarse gown—at its faded brown color, at the stains that would not come out no matter how hard I scrubbed, at the fresh rime of dust from dragging through the streets. And I felt. . . ashamed to appear before Shahrazad. I brushed at the dust, but it was no use.

  From the shadowed hallway where I stood, I could see only a narrow strip of one wall of the room beyond the arch. Sunlight streamed in through a high mosaic of colored glass and through a carved wooden screen below.

  Dunyazad reappeared in the arch. “Come! She awaits!”

  Slowly, I edged through the arch . . .

  And nearly tripped over a stack of books.

  Books! They were everywhere—strewn all over the sofas, all over the carpeted floor. Stacks and drifts and mounds of them—some open, some shut. And scrolls! They were littered all about the books. A fortune in books and scrolls.

  And there, kneeling on the floor, one finger poised upon the page of an open book. . . was Shahrazad.

  I did know her at once, though I don’t know exactly how. She was not at all the way I had imagined her. True, she was beautiful, even though she wore a robe from the baths and her long hair hung wet and uncombed down her back. Her skin was clear and glowing, her lips full, her eyebrows pleasingly arched, her lashes a thick, dark fringe. But what shocked me was her eyes. Haunted, hunted eyes. There was a look in them that dwelt somewhere in the spaces between hunger and terror.

  I had seen that look before in the eyes of a thief condemned to death. But here, in the eyes of the hero of my life, it chilled me to the bone.

  I moved forward, knelt, and kissed the floor before her.

  “Tell her that story about the fish—the one you were telling the children,” Dunyazad said.

  I swallowed. I? Tell a story to Shahrazad? But she was the one who had inspired me to tell stories. I only told stories because of her.

  “Tell her,” Dunyazad insisted.

  I swallowed again, licked my lips. “A jinn told a fisherman to ... to cast his net. . . into the sea,” I began haltingly.

  Shahrazad moved her hand from the page. She fixed her haunted gaze upon my face. It was difficult, with her staring so, to latch on to the tale. “The net came up with four fish in it—one white, one red, one blue, one yellow,” I said. “But when the fisherman sold them to the Sultan . . .” It was coming now, though in starts and lurches. As I went on, Shahrazad leaned toward me, seemed to devour me with her eyes. “And lifting up his robe, he showed the Sultan that he was a man only from his head to his waist, and that his feet and legs and hips were made of black marble—”

  “No!”

  The voice came harsh and sudden; I broke off the tale and gaped.

  Shahrazad turned to her sister. “I told this story long ago. Don’t you remember? It was one of the early ones.”

  Dunyazad sighed. “It did sound more familiar this second time. But. . .” She turned to me. “Tell her another tale. You said you know others.”

  I did know other tales, but they all fled my mind in the heat of Shahrazad’s gaze. Fragments of stories I knew racketed about my mind—a magic lamp, a wealthy portress, a foolish weaver. I seized upon this last and began, haltingly followed the thread of the tale. But just when it was coming clear to me, Shahrazad cried, “No! I’ve told it!”

  I tried tale after tale, dragging each one up through the tumult in my mind until I could find the shape of it. But each time Shahrazad broke in before I was well along. Most of them she had told the Sultan before; a few she thought he wouldn’t like. “He yawned when I told a story very like that one,” she said. “Yawned! I musn’t tell tales that make him yawn!” And once she said something odd—something I would have questioned her about if I had dared: “He’s not ready for that one yet,” she said.

  I went through all my stock of old tales, the ones I tell the neighborhood children. They’re not so choosy as the Sultan. They love hearing their favorites over and over. At last I remembered a tale I had heard one day from a storyteller in the bazaar—a tale of a mermaid named Julnar.

  “So she swam out of the sea and rested on the shore of an island under the full moon, and a man who was passing by found her. He took her home and tried to make love to her, but she hit him on the head. So he sold her to a merchant. . .”

  Shahrazad moved toward me until her face was so close that I could have counted her eyelashes. The sweet musk of her perfume filled my nose. Her eyes never left mine; I was pinioned in her gaze. She grasped my wrist hard—until it hurt—but I dared not protest. “I’ve not heard this before,” she whispered. “I’ve not heard this.”

  When at last I came to the end of the tale, Shahrazad let out a deep sigh. She unclasped my wrist, stared dazedly down at the white finger marks on my skin.

  “What is your name?” she asked, looking up at last.

  “Marjan,” I said.

  “Marjan.” She spoke my name as if tasting it, as if it were some rare delicacy served for the very first time. She breathed deeply; some of the tautness drained from her face. “Well, Marjan,” she said. “You have told me a tale that I have never heard before. And that is quite a feat, for I know many tales. And that is also good, for the Sultan does not fancy a tale twice-told. His memory is sharp
. I lose track of them, there have been so many . . . He complains when the tales seem too much alike.”

  “We should have written down which tales she’s told, from the very start,” Dunyazad said. “We think she might know some she hasn’t told, or she could find some in her books. But they’re all starting to sound alike. It’s hard to be certain. We need to be certain.”

  “Couldn’t you . . . make up some stories?” I asked.

  Though I mostly told old tales, sometimes they veered off in strange new directions while I was telling them. I tried not to do this, because I wanted to be just like Shahrazad, and I had heard that she stayed faithful to the old tales. Other times, when I was daydreaming, I invented stories that were completely new. But I hardly ever told them—except when I ran out of old stories to tell.

  “I have made up a few,” Shahrazad said, “though it’s hard. I always like the old tales better than anything I can think up. And I can’t seem to make up anything new right now. They all begin to sound familiar, and I’m afraid I’m just remembering—not inventing.”

  “Being so tired doesn’t help,” Dunyazad said. “She just gave birth five days ago.”

  I nodded. Everybody knew. Criers had run through the streets announcing it, and everywhere people had celebrated.

  “I never thought . . .” Shahrazad shook her head. “I knew it would take time for the stories to do their work, but . . . Nine hundred eighty-nine nights it’s been! Nine hundred eighty-nine nights!”

  Slowly, she rose to her feet, began to pace back and forth in an uncluttered patch of carpet. She was tall, I saw. Long and slender of neck and arm and leg. Much taller than her younger sister. Her movements were not lively, like Dunyazad’s, but graceful. Like a swan. And it seemed to me that some power was beginning to fill her—some power that had been drained before.

  “This king,” she said. “What did you say his name was?”

  “Shahriman,” I said.

  “Shahriman.” Shahrazad stopped for a moment, closing her eyes. “Shahriman.” She opened her eyes and began once again to pace. “So King Shahriman owned a hundred concubines but none of them had given him a child. One day as he was lamenting this, one of his guards came to him and said, ’My lord, at the door is a merchant with a slave girl who is more beautiful than the moon.’ Do I have it so far, Marjan?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And she was as beautiful as the merchant had said. But when the king asked her name, she did not say a word. Only her beauty protected her from his anger. And then he asked . . . Who was it he asked, Marjan? The merchant? Or his guard? Or his slave girls?”

  “His slave girls.”

  “Yes, now I remember. He asked his slave girls whether the girl had spoken, and they said, ’From the time of her coming until now she has not uttered one word.’”

  Then Shahrazad told us Julnar’s story, stopping, from time to time, to ask about this detail or that. She told how at last, when Julnar was with child, she spoke to Shahriman about herself, how she was the daughter of the King of the High Seas, how her father had died and his kingdom had been seized. Julnar had quarreled with her brother and had thrown herself upon the mercy of a man from the land, who had sold her to the merchant, who had sold her to Shahriman. Then Shahrazad told how Julnar begged the king to let her summon her family for the birthing, because women of the land do not know how women of the sea give birth to children. “Let me know when I go astray, Marjan,” Shahrazad said. “I want to learn it exactly as you told it.”

  So intent was I upon teaching the tale that I did not see the three women standing outside the archway until Dunyazad motioned them impatiently to come in. They advanced upon us, arms laden with gowns and robes, jewelry and jars, brushes and vials. They surrounded Shahrazad. One woman whisked off the queen’s robe and began dressing her in layer upon layer of silks. Another began combing her hair; the third daubed and brushed at her face, filling the air with a fog of fragrant powder.

  And all the while Shahrazad practiced, telling the tale over and over, making some parts fast and others slow, making some parts loud and others soft—binding them all together in a pleasing cadence, like a song. When she spoke of the ocean, you could almost hear the boom and hiss of it in her voice. When she told about Julnar, she seemed to slip inside the skin of a sea creature and move in a watery way. Soon, she stopped asking me questions and posed them to herself. “Shall I stop here, tonight,” she wondered, “or later in the tale? Shall I word it thisly, or thusly?”

  In time, the story came unbroken, as if she had known it all her life.

  A slave girl entered, went round lighting the lamps; only then did I realize that it was growing dark. Long, flickering shadows stretched across the room. Shahrazad stood murmuring in a pool of golden lamplight while the women tended to her. A robe of midnight blue hung down over her shoulders. It was purfled with pearls, like stars. Her face looked rapt, serene. It was luminous as the moon.

  “Then Julnar kindled a flame in a chafing dish, and she took lign aloes and tossed them into the fire. She spoke some magical words, and all at once a great smoke arose, and the sea began to froth and foam. Presently, Julnar’s family arose from the waves: first her brother, Salih, then her mother, Farahshah. They walked across the face of the water until they drew near Julnar’s window and recognized her.”

  And a huge eunuch was standing at the door. He wore a headdress encrusted with jewels, and robes of gleaming cloth-of-gold. His face—black and smooth and hairless—looked distant. Cold. “It is time,” he said.

  Dunyazad clasped her sister in her arms. When she moved away, I caught the gleam of unshed tears in her eyes. Shahrazad moved toward the eunuch, then paused, walked back to me. She leaned in close, grasped my wrist. “Thank you, Marjan,” she whispered. And I saw it then, in her eyes—a quicksilver spasm of fear. But in the next instant, it was gone.

  Shahrazad turned, swept out of the room.

  I stood beneath the arch and watched for as long as I could as she walked with the eunuch down the alabaster corridor toward the Sultans bedchamber. Her head was held high, her hips swayed gracefully; she was the picture of serenity. And yet she looked so frail. The lives of all the young women in the harem—all the young women in the city!—rested upon those slender shoulders. Depended upon her ability to please a man who would slay her for a yawn. Hung by the thin thread of a tale I had heard from a beggar in the bazaar. And, now that I had seen the terror behind the mask of Shahrazad’s serenity, I only revered her the more.

  She was the bravest person I had ever seen in all my entire life.

  Chapter 3

  The Wish

  LESSONS FOR LIFE AND STORYTELLING

  Sometimes, when you wish for a thing and then it comes true, you discover that maybe you didn’t think through your wish all the way to the end. Like in the old tales when a jinn grants a wish that somebody made lightly. Then, once they have it—the thing they had wished for—they realize they didn’t really want it after all.

  My auntie Chava used to say that wishing has power. That when you wish for something you are concentrating on it. And when you concentrate on a thing, you help to bring it about.

  You must be very, very careful what you wish for.

  We were late getting home.

  No sooner had we unlocked the gate and stepped into the courtyard than Uncle Eli came hobbling toward us in the twilight, peppering us with questions, his tassels swinging, his yellow turban askew. Where had we been? Were we all right? Why had we taken so long? Had there been trouble? Had we been robbed? He had sent out Old Mordecai to search for us—or for our dead bodies. They had not known which they would find.

  “We are fine,” Auntie Chava assured him, “and there has been no trouble. Quite the contrary, in fact. We have had . . . a little adventure.” She glanced at me, and a smile quirked the corners of her mouth. “Hold out your hands, Eli.”

  She reached into her sash and took out a handful of coins. A stream of gold di
nars clanked into Uncle Eli’s knobby, cupped hands. The last few coins slipped off the heap, rang on the tiles. Eli looked up in wonder. “This much?” he said. “But they were not worth so much.”

  “No,” Auntie Chava said, “they weren’t. It was Marjan who earned the rest of it—with her stories.”

  Then she told how Dunyazad had taken me to her sister, and how I had told the story, and how Dunyazad had rewarded us with a handful of dinars. Eli funneled the coins into a leather purse; I hunted down the ones on the floor. Then he bade me describe Shahrazad for him—in detail—and tell the mermaid story all over again.

  When I had done, Eli tugged at his long white beard, looking pleased. “Don’t we have the clever one here, Chava? Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?”

  It had been Uncle Eli’s idea to take me in more than five years before, when I was almost eight. After my mother died, her husband—second husband, not my father—hadn’t wanted me in his household anymore, but he couldn’t find anyone to take me. Uncle Eli hired me out of pity, I think. Auntie Chava said at the time that I was far too young to be of any use to her; but now, Uncle Eli was always crowing about how smart he had been to discover me.

  It’s against the law to sell a Muslim as a slave to a Jew, but Muslims can work for Jews for wages. My mother’s husband, Aga Jamsheed, collected several months’ wages in advance, and then he and his whole family left the city. Uncle Eli was saving my back wages, just in case Aga Jamsheed ever returned.

  Still, Auntie Chava and Uncle Eli didn’t treat me as a servant. They treated me as a daughter. He was softer with me than she was. He sneaked me sweets, and he fussed at Auntie Chava not to work me so hard. Sometimes he told me stories from his Scriptures, which reminded me of some of the stories I knew from the Koran.

 

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