I began to get a glimmering, then, of what Shahrazad had meant when she spoke of teaching the Sultan. And my awe of her grew. She was not simply saving her own life—saving many women’s lives—by telling entertaining tales. She was . . . educating the Sultan. Enlarging his view of the world. Giving his bitter, cramped soul room to grow. Making him . . . human again.
“Anyway,” she went on, “you can’t just go chopping off the parts of a story that you don’t agree with and scrubbing the rest of it clean. You violate its spirit. You rob it of its power. You—Sister! There you are!”
Dunyazad entered the room. She smiled her dimply smile at Shahrazad, then turned and smiled at me. Maybe she trusted me, now that the story had gone well.
When the door had shut tight behind her, she asked, “Did you tell her?”
Sighing, Shahrazad shook her head. To me, she said, “I asked the Sultan where he had heard the tale, but he looked off into the distance and didn’t answer. We were hoping we could learn the rest of it some other way. So—I’m sorry, Marjan. But—you’ll have to go out again.”
“I know,” I said.
“But I don’t think you’d better go out in a chest. Or come back in the same way you go out.”
I nodded fervently.
“And this time,” Dunyazad said, “I’m going, too.”
* * *
You would have thought, by the way Shahrazad acted next, that Dunyazad had said she was going to jump off the highest minaret in the city. And it was a crazy idea. But Dunyazad was stubborn—even stubborner than Auntie Chava sometimes gets. “I forbid it,” Shahrazad kept saying. “I absolutely forbid it.”
“I have ways of getting around your forbiddings—as well you know,” Dunyazad replied.
Shahrazad sighed. “Listen to reason, Little Sister. If the Khatun doesn’t scare you, think of this: Father has enemies. They might use you to get to him. They might—hurt you to punish him. And Father would be your enemy should he ever find out. Likely he’d marry you off to some toothless, doddering old landlord, and I’d never see you again! And think of me! If anything happened to you, I wouldn’t be able to say I need to tell my little sister a story. Shahryar would have to admit that the stories are for him. And he might be too proud for that.”
“But I have an idea!”
“Of course you have an idea! You always have ideas! And sometimes you even have good ones. But this is reckless, Sister! It’s madness! Marjan, tell her she’s mad.”
“Um,” I said. I couldn’t say that. “It would be . . . easier . . . with just me.”
“No—no, wait!” Dunyazad said. “My plan calls for two, and there’s no one else to do it. Here’s what I want to do. You know how Princess Budur dressed up as a man and no one knew?”
“Princess Budur! Dunya, Princess Budur is not real. She’s a girl in a tale! People in tales do all kinds of crazy things. They turn into birds and donkeys. They fly on toy horses and get into shipwrecks. That doesn’t mean you should do them.”
“But, Sister, you’re the one who taught me that there is truth below the surfaces of tales. That we can learn courage from them. That they can teach us how to live our lives.”
“Don’t go twisting my words around! This is crazy and you know it. I forbid it.”
“So you’re the only one who gets to be brave and heroic. Brave Shahrazad. The savior of all the women. And I have to be meek and obedient. Little meek Dunya. Isn’t she lucky to have such a brave, heroic older sister!”
Shahrazad struggled to hold back a smile, then gave up and, laughing, said, “No one ever called you meek, Sister.”
An answering, dimpled smile flickered across Dun-yazad’s face. “Well, maybe not. But if we don’t do this, the Sultan will be angry and chop off your head, and I won’t be far behind. Preserving you will save me.”
“Not if you get yourself killed first. I forbid it.”
“Sister, I am doing this! With your permission or without. So what do you plan to do about it? Send for Father to marry me off to a toothless old landlord—”
“I’m tempted!”
“—or help us, so we won’t get caught?”
Chapter 13
She Should Have Been Strong
LESSONS FOR LIFE AND STORYTELLING
There is a proverb I have heard: “Life under the wing of a fly is still better than the sleep of the grave.” I used to believe that, if you had a choice, you should pick life under the wing of a fly.
Especially if you were someone’s mother.
There were many wrinkles that had to be pressed out of Dunyazad’s plan.
One was the part about dressing up as boys. Dunyazad had fallen in love with the idea, but it didn’t make sense. “Girls can get along in the outside world just as well as boys,” she said. “Princess Budur proved that when she dressed up as her husband and nobody knew the difference. She even ruled and nobody knew.”
“I’m glad you were listening,” Shahrazad said, “but her situation does not apply to you. In the first place, she’s a made-up person. In the second place, you need to be as covered up as possible, which means veiled, which means dressed as a woman, not a man.”
Eventually, Dunyazad saw reason and gave up the idea. I was glad. I didn’t want to go traipsing through the city unveiled.
Another wrinkle was those footsteps I’d heard that morning on my way to see Shahrazad. “You’re certain you’re being followed?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said.
“Do you know who?”
“I didn’t see but. . . I think it may be Soraya.”
Dunyazad jumped up, pushed open the door, and went out. She returned in a moment. “It is Soraya. When she saw me, she fled down the stairs and ducked into a room.”
“Hmm.” Shahrazad bit her lip, looked thoughtful. “We’ll have to do something about that.”
Yet another wrinkle was the part about both of us leaving the harem. Dunyazad was even more in love with this idea than with the dressing-as-a-boy idea. But Shahrazad wouldn’t allow it until we came to the next wrinkle.
Which was: How could we make sure that this would be the last time either of us had to leave the harem? Once had been bad enough. But twice. Far more dangerous, because now the Khatun was suspicious. This next time had to be the last.
“How much more of the story was left?” Shahrazad asked. “Did he say?”
“He said . . .” I tried to remember. “Something like . . . ’There is much left to hear.’”
“More than he could tell you in a morning? In a day?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I should have asked.”
Shahrazad rocked on her cushion, hugging a small satin pillow. “That makes it hard.”
For a moment, no one spoke. Not even Dunyazad had an idea.
Then I thought of Zaynab and her pigeons. They were trained to return messages to the palace. If the storyteller had some palace pigeons, he could send back bits of story.
“Ah!” Shahrazad said, when I told her what I was thinking. She turned to Dunyazad; they exchanged a long, meaningful look. And I felt. . . cut out of the conversation. The way I had been before, when they planned how I would get out in the chest.
“Well. We don’t have to decide right now,” Shahrazad said. “Come back tomorrow morning, and we’ll talk again. And, Marjan—don’t tell anyone!”
* * *
Soon after I left, I heard footfalls behind me again. When I turned to look, I saw the corner of a green robe vanish behind a tall urn. Soraya.
This was unbearable! I paused for a moment to think.
I could try to lose her. But even if I succeeded, what would I do then? Hide from her all day?
I could try to ignore her, but that would be hard.
I wondered . . . what would she do if I went up on the roof to see Zaynab?
I would find out!
I took a roundabout route to the spiral kitchen stairs, half hoping that Soraya would give up and leave me alone
. But she didn’t. I could hear a faint swishing behind me, and sometimes the hurried padding of bare feet on tile. When I came out on the roof, I looked back down at the steps. The whole top spiral was empty. But I had a feeling Soraya was lower down, lurking around a bend. Still, she would have nowhere to hide on the roof. She would just have to lurk.
I spent all morning up on the roof terrace with Zaynab. She showed me how to take care of the pigeons—how to feed them, how to clear a clouded eye or mend a cut foot. She taught me how to act around the pigeons, to acknowledge them with a look when you came near. They expected it of you, she said. It was only polite. She said they could tell what kind of a mood you were in—if you were happy, or sick, or mad. She showed me how to roll up the message paper—tightly!—and how to slip it into the tiny wooden capsule and fasten it to a pigeons leg. You had to do it just right. Make it not so tight that it would cut off the bird’s blood flow, but snug enough so that it wouldn’t fall off. Gently, gently, Zaynab said. And afterward, she let me throw one of her birds into the air.
There was something calming about Zaynab, about her pavilion high above the palace, about the burbling of her birds. She had a name for each one, and she treated them with a tenderness that made me think, for some reason, of my mother. Words came easier now between us, and her humming seemed happy—not nervous and strange.
I longed to confide in her, to tell her about the storyteller and my idea about the pigeons. But Shahrazad had told me not to. So I didn’t.
We ate after noon prayers—cheese and raisins and fresh bread that Zaynab cooked over a brazier. Several birds still perched on her shoulders, but she didn’t have to wash anything this time. There was a stack of clean cups and bowls on a wooden shelf. And the floor had been scrubbed as well.
Just as we were finishing our meal, the young eunuch with the soft face came and summoned Zaynab to Shahrazad.
He must be the one, I thought.
Zaynab said that I could stay, but I didn’t. I went down to my room for a nap. I didn’t see Soraya. But just before I slipped off to sleep, I thought I heard, outside my room, the clinking of game tiles on the floor.
* * *
The next morning, Shahrazad summoned me again, just as she had done the day before. When I entered her chamber, I heard pigeons cooing and, looking about, saw two slender bird baskets in a corner of the room. I could see through the wicker that there were three levels inside, with birds on every one.
Shahrazad told me the new plan. There were still a lot of ifs’ s and uncertainties to it. The parts that happened inside the harem seemed clear and plausible—at least, the parts that she told me. Someone was helping us, and she wouldn’t say who.
But the outside-the-harem parts were full of foggy patches and outright mistakes. “A thousand pardons,” I said. “There are many carpet merchants in the bazaar. We’ll need to know which one.” And, “The merchants don’t transport oil in ceramic jars. They use leather ones, because they’re lighter.” I told Shahrazad that silver dirhams and copper fils were better than gold dinars—less conspicuous. I asked for veils that were not so fine. “And Dunyazad needs to take off her rings. All of them. We want her to look poor.” But I could still wear my silver-and-garnet comb, I told myself, because it would be covered.
All the while, I felt a growing uneasiness. Shahrazad and her sister were as naive about the outer world as I was about the harem. They had no grasp of it at all!
Still, this plan—once I had helped them press the wrinkles out of it—seemed as if it might work. IF we were lucky.
* * *
I returned to the roof.
This day, I found Zaynab preparing to lower a lidded basketful of pigeons over the side. “The pigeon boy is waiting,” she said.
“What will he do with them?”
“He’ll give them to a caravan master, who will take them far across the kingdom so that people can send back messages to the Sultan.”
Near the edge of the roof was a sort of barrel on its side, with rope wrapped around it. You could turn it with a handle, like a spit. A winch, Zaynab called it. There was a hook on the end of the rope, which Zaynab attached to a ring at the top of the basket. I pulled my veil over my head and peered down as Zaynab turned the winch and the basket descended with a loud creaking noise. The boy was standing on the street, looking up. I watched him slip the hook off the ring and then scamper away, the basket dangling from his hand.
I stayed there all day, on the roof with Zaynab and her birds. I loved holding the pigeons’ soft bodies against mine, taking off the treasured messages and putting them in the small silver casket, which Zaynab delivered to the Sultan’s guards. I loved the dusty smell of feathers and the birds’ burbling coos when I stroked their heads. I began to get to know them by the names Zaynab had given them, began to tell them apart by the colors of their feathers and by how they behaved. Twice, I caught myself talking to them and, once, a pigeon flew up onto my shoulder and pecked at my hair.
As I looked out across the city to the green hills at the horizon, my mind started to open up and think about things I had locked out in my fever to get the stories. What lay beyond those hills? I wondered. What kind of places had all those women and girls gone to when they escaped from the city? In the tales, the world beyond the green hills was filled with wonders—carved wooden horses that fly, islands where the soil is made of diamonds, vast kingdoms ruled by women.
Zaynab and I lay on our backs at sunset, watching the pink and purple clouds go sailing across the sky. Then, after prayers, I asked how she had come to live here. She told me that her grandfather had been governor of the messenger pigeons many years ago and that her mother, a wily woman, had finagled the position for her. “I worked for the old sultan, Shahryar’s father,” she said. “The old one promised my mother never to replace me—but his son tried to once.” She laughed softly.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“He put in a man who didn’t know a pigeon from a duck. He made a mess of things, and so Shahryar called me back.”
“Were you here when . . . during the purge?”
Zaynab nodded, suddenly grave. “I used to ... go down to the harem sometimes. I had friends there. But after the . . . Well, now I don’t go there anymore. It was terrible. It—” She turned away from me; I lay still and listened to the deep, mournful cooing of the birds. In a moment, Zaynab turned back and sighed. “I don’t. . . get many visitors these days,” she said.
The stars came glimmering out in the deep blue dusk, and after a while, I told Zaynab about Auntie Chava and Uncle Eli. A wave of homesickness engulfed me.
And, after a longer while, Zaynab asked me gently about my foot.
I had never told anyone about it. At my old home, where I had lived with my mother, everybody knew. Auntie Chava knew, too, though she never said a word about it. But she would purse her lips and shake her head sometimes, watching me limp. She was angry about it, I could tell.
But I had never told anyone, myself. I never thought I would. Still, lying on the roof beside Zaynab, looking up at the stars . . . she made me feel that it would be all right to tell.
* * *
My mother is calling me.
“Marjan. Come here,” she says.
I’m afraid. Her voice sounds funny, a little quavery and weak. Her room is dark.
“Come here, Marjan. Come sit beside me.”
I tiptoe into the room. I can see her now, in the dimness—her long, pale face, her dark eyes. I sit down beside her on the pallet. She smiles, runs her hand through my hair. She moves her fingers lightly across my forehead, my eyebrows, my cheeks. “Marjan,” she says, and I can feel the old warmth now, behind the new strange thinness of her voice. I lean against her; her arms fold me in; I can hear the beating of her heart.
“Marjan,” she says again.
She draws in breath and sniffles; I pull away, look into her face. Tears. Her eyes are shining, and there are tears running down her cheeks.
; “You’ll be all right when I’m gone, my beloved. I know you will. You’re strong and you’re bright. You’re a jewel, Marjan. Always remember that. A beautiful jewel.”
Gone? The fear flares up again. “Where are you going?” I ask. “Take me with you. I want to come, too.”
She folds me in again, and I feel something trembly in her breath. And then she’s moving my foot, pulling it away from my body, twisting it so that one side of it is flat against the floor.
“Hold it just like that,” she says, and her voice is so hoarse, it’s almost a whisper. “Just for a moment.”
I pull my foot away. “Why?” I ask. “I don’t want to.”
She puts my foot back the way it was. “Just trust me, Marjan,” she says. “Leave it there. Just for a moment.”
She’s moving now, pushing aside her cushion. There’s something in her hands, something heavy, something she can barely lift.
“Madar. . .”
“Put your foot back the way I showed you.” Her voice is harder now, harder than before.
I put my foot back. She’s standing now, holding the thing in her hands. A pot. A heavy pot. It’s high in the air now, and she’s shaking, but the pot keeps going higher.
“Just for a moment,” she says, and then the pot moves and Madar moves and pebbles are flying everywhere and pain explodes in my foot. Someone is screaming, and there are footsteps and loud voices, and the voice is still screaming and the pain is still exploding, and it’s bright. It’s bright. So bright.
* * *
“She did it out of love. You understand that, Marjan, don’t you? She did it out of love.”
I didn’t know how I had gotten there, with Zaynab’s arms around me. I drew in a shaky breath, fought to keep myself from crying. Another breath. I pulled away, let the old familiar anger fend off tears.
“How could a person love you and then hurt you that way?” I demanded. “Maim you for the rest of your life? So that people would laugh at you and nobody would ever marry you and you would always have to be someone else’s servant?”
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