In Sleeping Beauty's Bed

by Mitzi Szereto

  Indeed, the youngest moaned wretchedly as she shimmied beneath the imprisoning arms of her dance partner, who had lifted her completely off the ground, leaving her legs to dangle beneath her upraised skirt. She clutched her ruffled bosom in distress, pleading with the grunting and grimacing squire to release her from her misery lest she die before the next sunrise. However, the fine fellow appeared not even to hear her. Instead he stepped up his vicious attack until the Countess began to howl like the creatures of the night of which her father was so terribly fond, her pointy eyeteeth bared to the moon. Before the concerned soldier could intervene on her behalf, he spied a tiny hole that had been forced into view by the retracted silk of her underdrawers. Although at first glance it was black as pitch, a closer inspection showed it to be as red and flamboyant as the poppies he had encountered in his desert travels. It was here that the squire’s great cudgel vanished time and time again—as did those of his male companions, all of whom seemed to have the same effect upon the frantic young Countess. As the rubber-cloaked soldier proceeded to monitor the other dancing couples, he noted that all twelve of the Count’s daughters sported a similarly outfitted hole.

  The revelry went on well into the small hours of the morning until even the moon itself had gone to bed. Each squire performed this awkward dance with each Countess until all parties had been happily paired together, the wolfen howls of the sisters and those of the squires creating an eerie symphony of night music. Despite such equitable arrangements, there were those who desired a second dance with a partner already known to them. The eldest Countess, in particular, was shockingly bold in making her wishes manifest. Before the night was through, she had enjoyed two or three dances each with all twelve squires, hanging forward over the bridge of their arms as they swung her wriggling and baying figure about, her sharp teeth snapping at the air. Unlike her greedier older sister, the youngest seemed modestly content to partake of one promenade per squire, after which she dropped to the pebbly ground in quivery exhaustion, the soles of her shoes worn clear through to her feet. As she occupied herself readjusting the disarranged gusset of her underdrawers, the soldier would once again be granted a glimpse of the little mystery hole the dozen squires had used. To his astonishment, it had grown as large as the one belonging to her eldest sister.

  The pink light of dawn was almost upon them by the time the squires rowed the dance-weary Countesses back over the lake. As the rowboat in which he had been traveling approached its pebbly moorings, its invisible mariner jumped out, charging ahead of the Count’s daughters and reaching his quarters before the first-born had touched the tattered bottom of her shoe to the top-most step in the secret passageway. Flinging himself into his pine sleeping box, the soldier let loose with his most boisterous snores, his heart pounding furiously from his exertions and the curious events he had witnessed. Fortunately, the sisters had no reason to check on their unwanted sentry, who had forgotten to remove his rubber cloak and thus would have been invisible to them anyway. They instead fell into their mahogany beds in lifeless slumber, their battered shoes and moist underdrawers forgotten on the floor beside them.

  Following in the wake of his unsuccessful forerunners, the soldier also made the tantalizing discovery of the dampened wisps of white that lay crumpled up within the left shoe of each Countess. Something compelled him to try on the pair belonging to the youngest, which hugged his masculine curves and lumps with the snugness of a fine glove and left him gasping for breath when he ran his hands over himself in an appreciative caress. He so enjoyed the delicacy of the silk beneath the putty-like feel of the rubber that he sampled them all, since they proved so much more pleasing against the skin, what with their pretty owners a mere arm’s length away. Indeed, this fallen warrior all but scraped his battle-scarred knees to bleeding, so much furtive crawling about the floor did he do in his self-appointed quest for fulfillment.

  On the second night of his stay beneath the Count’s roof, the soldier again feigned sleep so that he could slip back into the black rubber cloak and pursue the unsuspecting Countesses to their illicit assignations. Only now, rather than collecting silver or gold or diamonds, he had a far more valuable token in mind.

  When the moment arrived for him to be summoned before the Countesses’ father, this former combatant went armed with his precious leaves, which he presented to the Count, along with a circuitous explanation of the lake and the twelve boats and the twelve squires whose handsome presences had rowed them. He spent an inordinate amount of time belaboring details of lesser consequence such as the quality of pebble on the shore and the motion of wave on the lake, even going to the trouble of describing the color of the moonlight. Despite his anger, the Count was relieved to have finally received an explanation for the disgraceful condition of his daughters’ shoes and underdrawers…although he was not given the exact specifics of the dancing that had taken place or the cudgels that had been wielded with such impunity by his daughters’ dancing partners. For it appeared that the soldier had come to an arrangement with the Countesses.

  The Count next called upon his recalcitrant offspring, who, in the face of the evidence against them, were obliged to confess. Apparently satisfied, he instructed their garrulous sentry to select for himself a wife from among the twelve. It would not be an easy choice to make. Each of the sisters possessed considerable appeal in face and figure, although in the soldier’s eyes their smiles left a great deal to be desired. It might be thought that he would have taken for himself the youngest, since he had so admired her vernal artlessness, not to mention the poppy-like redness of her little mystery hole. Yet instead he claimed the eldest as a bride, her boldness and commanding nature offering him a battle he very much desired to fight with his bayonet—even if it was not so stalwart as a squire’s cudgel.

  The couple took for themselves a private apartment in the castle, one located near the bedchamber now occupied by the eleven remaining Countesses. With the Count’s troubled mind at peace, his daughters resumed their nocturnal activities with the complicity and silence of their new brother-in-law, who was most eager to make good upon his bargain.

  Night after night, the sisters stole away to meet the handsome young squires at the lake, only to return before dawn, at which time the soldier would be waiting to collect from each of them his token. Unlike a glittering memento of silver or gold or diamond, the token he wished to extract from his sisters-in-law commanded a value well beyond that of the monetary. Indeed, he did not need to await his father-in-law’s death to become a wealthy man, for he attained his riches in other ways—and that is how it came to pass that the soldier acquired such an extensive collection of ladies’ underdrawers.

  THE EBONY HORSE

  A tale of the exotic East, “The Ebony Horse” can be found in The Thousand and One Nights, or, as it has come to be more commonly known, The Arabian Nights—an anthology of tales assembled from remote parts of the Islamic world over several centuries. Although admired by the West as a work of literature, The Arabian Nights has always been held in low esteem by the Arab world. In fact, were it not for the Europeans, it might never have made its way into our literature.

  “The Ebony Horse” is one in a series of stories told over a thousand nights by Princess Shahrazad to her husband, King Shahryar. The princess used such stories as a form of entertainment and distraction and—most importantly—as a means to keep her life. For these stories served to prevent her husband from continuing with his pastime of marrying a different woman each night and, after taking her virginity, beheading her in the morning. Having discovered his first wife in sexual dalliance with a blackamoor slave, the king vowed to take no more chances. After experiencing a night of erotic pleasure with a steady succession of wives, he ordered them all put to death. However, he would soon run out of marital candidates as “…parents fled with their daughters till there remained not in the city a young person fit for carnal copulation.” Fortunately for all parties concerned, by the time Shahrazad finishes spinning he
r tales, she will have borne the king a son—and will thus be spared the fate that befell so many of her sex.

  Much speculation exists as to the true origins of The Arabian Nights. Although the flavor of the work is distinctly Middle Eastern, with the core of the collection believed to represent medieval Cairo, its earlier tales, such as “The Ebony Horse,” likely originated in either Persia or India, only to be passed down from generation to generation in the oral tradition by the storytellers of the Arabs, Egyptians, Iraqis, and other Mohammedan peoples. Over time, more and more stories came to be added, and by the fifteenth century the collection had been set down in manuscript form.

  Yet, many centuries before the tales in The Arabian Nights even appeared in the Arabic language, they may already have lived in print. In the Hezar Efsan (A thousand stories) from Persia, the frame story also consists of a king who puts each of his wives to death, only to be distracted from this practice by his latest wife Shahrazad—a concubine of royal blood who keeps her husband entertained for a thousand nights with a series of stories. Despite its parental connection to The Arabian Nights, the Hezar Efsan likely has its own parent in India. The idea of framing stories within stories to provide a pretext for their telling is widely regarded as an Indian invention.

  The Arabian Nights eventually made its way to Europe, undergoing various translations and revisions to suit the tastes and mores of the day. Just as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm stamped their personal imprints on the folktales of Europe, so, too, would the translators who chose to tackle The Arabian Nights. Since many of the stories had been composed during the golden age of Baghdad—at the time a city of both pleasure and a marked licentiousness among the upper classes—the Middle Eastern reader would not need to look very hard to locate seduction, adultery, incest, and orgies on its pages. But all this would change, along with much of the integrity of the tales, as Western scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth century got their hands on the Arabic manuscripts. Although the original work treated matters of sex in an uninhibited manner, such frankness was deemed unacceptable by the “modern” reader. A gulf existed between standards of morality and taste in Eastern and Western cultures—a difference made all the more intense by the developing prudery of middle-class readers, which prompted a continual expurgation of sexual content in The Arabian Nights. Nevertheless, one translator refused to shrink from such frank sexuality. In reaction to the Victorian prudery of his day, author and explorer Sir Richard Burton decided not only to include, but even to emphasize, the erotic content in the tales, thereby making his work the closest to the original.

  Considered one of the oldest stories in The Arabian Nights, “The Ebony Horse” appears to be of Persian extraction and may be a survivor of the Hezar Efsan. Although not as sexually infused as some of the neighboring tales, it is not without the occasional erotic passage. Unlike his blushing predecessors, Sir Richard seemed to relish such passages, especially those describing the prince’s desire for the beautiful princess. “…[T]he fires of longing flamed up in his heart and pine and passion redoubled upon him. Grief and regret were sore upon him and his bowels yearned in him for love of the King’s daughter….” Such extravagance of language cannot easily be found in similar works. This literary style would prove quite popular as more and more readers (and even a few writers) came to discover the lure of the exotic and, indeed, the erotic in The Arabian Nights.

  IN A LAND OF GOLDEN DESERT SANDS THERE lived a great and powerful sultan named Sabur. He was much loved by his people, such that each year the day of his birth came to be celebrated with more lavishness than those that had gone before. As he sat upon his jeweled throne surrounded by his loyal courtiers, dervishes would dance, slave girls would serve, and cooks would proffer exotic victuals capable of pleasing the most fastidious of imperial palates. So revered was the Sultan that on his birthday every road in the empire stood littered with gifts, each finer than the next. But on the day marking his fifty-fifth year, one gift surpassed all the others.

  An old sage who dwelt in the cave of a mountain presented himself to the Sultan, bowing with extravagant ceremony to kiss the ground between Sabur’s large feet. On this special occasion he had brought a life-sized horse carved from the finest ebony, with eyes of glittering diamonds and a mane and tail created from the cocoon of the silkworm, the quality of which surpassed even that of the Sultan’s best robes. The tooled red hide of the saddle, bridle, and stirrups had been inlaid with gold and every precious jewel that could be cut from the earth. “Your Majesty, this horse has the power of flight. It can leap higher than a rainbow and cross the seven seas,” boasted the sage, his claim generating no less than a few scowls of disapproval.

  “If what you say is true, then I shall reward you with your dearest wish,” replied Sabur with an amused smile, convinced that this unctuous braggart was endeavoring to get the better of him.

  Upon hearing these words, the sage leapt up with startling agility onto the ebony horse. Rotating a peg hidden beneath the saddle, he flew off through the arches of the palace gallery and high into the pinkening sky. By the time he returned, the Sultan was beside himself with excitement at the notion of possessing the splendid horse. In his eyes, no wish would have been too grand to fulfill. Therefore when the sage requested the one thing of value belonging to the Sultan, it could not be denied. As a result, Sabur’s only daughter came to be promised to the sage in marriage.

  Outraged by this impetuous peddling of his young sister, the Sultan’s son found himself obliged to intervene in this unwholesome bargain, fearful that the outcome would not bode well for his unworldly sibling. “Father, this wicked man is a common sorcerer. Surely you cannot trade your precious daughter for a toy horse?” Kamar al-Akmar protested in horror.

  Sabur raised a hand to still his son’s heartfelt remonstrations. “A sultan’s word is his bond—and my word has been given. Perhaps you might elect to ride upon it yourself to determine if your opinion is in need of altering,” retorted the Sultan, who did not take kindly to having his decisions questioned.

  All the while, the old sage had been standing silently by, cloaking his instant hatred of Kamar behind a habitually sour visage. “Simply turn this little peg and you shall partake of journeys it would require ten lifetimes to experience,” he croaked, grinning yellowly and bowing toward the young Shahzada with false respect.

  Being of a fair mind, Kamar al-Akmar felt himself relenting. And indeed, no sooner did he climb up onto the saddle and touch his fingers to the peg the sage had indicated than the ebony horse went bounding off over the gallery and high into the desert sky. At first he enjoyed this amazing sensation of flight, but the heights he reached and the speed with which he traveled soon became too much for a young man created from flesh and blood, regardless of its royal content. The panicked Shahzada barked out a series of frantic commands, his words failing to penetrate the horse’s delicately carved ears as all he had ever known faded to an ochre haze beneath him.

  As the shadows flickering upon the marble walls of the palace became absorbed into the night, the Sultan grew increasingly concerned. He ordered his slaves to fetch the old sage, who claimed that nothing could be done. “The good Shahzada departed with such swiftness that I did not have an opportunity to explain to him about the second peg,” he shrugged in exaggerated dismay, his black heart swelling with joy at Kamar al-Akmar’s apparent misfortune. Only, rather than being allowed to console the Sultan with hollow declarations of sympathy, the sage found himself banished to a cell, where he would spend his tenure being whipped by the palace slaves. Since they were so often whipped themselves, they took great satisfaction from inflicting pain upon the body of another and performed their task far beyond their ruler’s most stringent expectations. Needless to say, the Sultan’s earlier matrimonial promise of his daughter was promptly rescinded, thereby further blackening the sage’s heart and setting him toward what would become an unwavering path of revenge.

  By this time, Kamar had trave
led a considerable distance and, while battling to control the ebony steed, he called upon Allah to bring him back down to safety. It was then that his furiously searching fingers alighted upon a corresponding peg located to the far side of the saddle—a peg so seemingly insignificant that one might have thought its presence was not meant to be detected. His fingertips barely grazed it before he discovered himself plunging perilously toward the converging rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Further adjustments managed to slow the wooden beast’s progress, and the young Shahzada was soon journeying at a more leisurely pace, marveling at the vast desert landscape laid out below him. As the veil of night cast itself over him, he was drawn toward the shimmering lights of Sana, where he had seen a magnificent palace whose marble exterior still glowed with the heat of the now-sleeping sun. Certain that he would be welcomed here, he maneuvered the ebony mount steadily downward, landing atop a flat portion of roof.